Kazunari wrote:

> 3. Are there any language OpenOffice.org could never support?

a) The phrase "Writing systems" is more accurate, than the word "language".

b) Assuming that one has the fonts, there are work around for _every_
awkward writing system.   Not pretty, and definitely not what I would
recommend for somebody who created/edited documents in them on a daily
basis.  OTOH, even the workarounds are better than nothing.

c) "Never" is a really bad phrase to use, because somebody might
decide that the writing the code is interesting/challenging/whatever. 
Sun, or other companies do not consider it to be cost-effective to
consider including code in their software, to correctly/easily handle
the writing systems.

All that said, here is a short list of languages and writing systems
that fall into that list:

i) Mongolian using the Mongolian Writing System.  
 This one is awkward, because it is a modified form of Arabic, but
written vertically, not horizontally. ]

ii) Boustrophedon writing systems
The biggest issue here is writing code that wraps lines correctly.
[This can be faked in OOo, by creating L2R paragraph style, and a R2L
paragraph style, then hitting return at the end of each line. 
Needless to say, any paragraph reformatting is a major PITA.]

iii) Rongo-Rongo.
The issue here is that alternate lines face 180 degrees to each other. 
This workaround here is to use CALC, for writing your documents.]

iv) Languages whose line is neither vertical, nor horizontal.  There
are half a dozen or so of them, but I've forgotten their names. [I'm
not talking about the languages in _Gulliver's Travel's_ though they
share that attribute. ] The basic issue is alignment.

Even if code that correctly handled all of those was contributed,
there is no reason to expect that it will be included in OOo, for the
simple reason that such code would turn OOo into a desktop publishing
program, and as such is to be rejected.

***
Those issues would have to be fixed, prior to OOo being distributed
with a User Interface in a language that uses one of those writing
systems.

xan

jonathon
-- 
Does your Office Suite conform to ISO Standards?

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