Re: Article on native language project

[Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa>]

On Yaum al-Arbi'a 28 Sha`ban 1425 11:16 am, Ingrid Marson wrote:
> Thanks for your help Munzir, that's very useful. I have a few other
> questions:

> * You said there are issues about shaping/joining - what technical
> problems does this present?

Yes, some of these issues are here:

* Arabic shaping/joinging is broken after a dot or a floating point in the 
dialog boxes (Bug #32289)

* Gaps between Arabic letters that should be joined (Bug #34139)

* ... ZWSP characters are given spaces in some fonts (Bug #17624)

Those bugs are specific to OO.o and not generally available in other 
applications. It's true that the basic functionality of shaping/joining 
works, but in some situations, we still face problems.

The technical problem arises is readability. Any arabic user would understand 
the text but would also understand that OO.o is not up to the user 
expectations.

Other more serious bugs are those that hang OO.o like (Bug #33003) which 
turned to be related to IBM's ICU. This bug is very serious since it makes 
OO.o hangs with one of the best arabic fonts ever made and widely used for 
professional works. (should be resolved for OOo 2.0)

> * I spoke to Jonathan Ben Avraham, a developer on the Hebrew native
> language project and he told me that he believes that Hebrew OpenOffice
> is about a year or two behind Microsoft in terms of support for RTL
> languages. Is Arab OpenOffice at the same stage?

Well, it depends on how long does a bug need to be fixed. Nothing systematic 
here. For now, it takes too long to fix a bug which should be corrected from 
sun/openoffice.org-developers side. Some of the bugs are filed since Jun 2003 
and not fixed yet. There are around

> * He also spoke of the difficulty of document assumptions in terms of
> RTL languages eg. the cursor being placed on left by default. Has the
> Arab team dealt with any of these issues?

AFAIK, this problem is also solved with Arabic in the latest localized builds 
but I am sorry I can't check it now. Give me a couple of days and would test 
and give feedback. (Hint: I am trying to make my new Athlon64 system work;) )

> Thanks again for your help Munzir. I will send you a link to the article
> when I have completed it!

Yes, please.


-- 
Munzir Taha  PGP Key available
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Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
Mandrake Club Member
Maintainer of the Open Arabic Bugs Project at
http://wiki.arabeyes.org/OpenBugs
Maintainer of Fedora Arabic Translation Project
CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS, Linux+, LPI 101
New Horizons CLC, Riyadh, SA