Thanks for your help Munzir, that's very useful. I have a few other questions:
* When was first version of OpenOffice in Hebrew released? * What features are due in the next major release (2.0) of OpenOffice in January 2005? * You said there are issues about shaping/joining - what technical problems does this present? * 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? * 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? Thanks again for your help Munzir. I will send you a link to the article when I have completed it! Regards, Ingrid -----Original Message----- From: Munzir Taha [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 13 October 2004 06:43 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Ingrid Marson Subject: Re: Article on native language project On Yau al-Thulatha 27 Sha`ban 1425 04:06 am, Ingrid Marson wrote: > That's right - I'm interested in what the project has achieved so far, > in current technical issues you face and in what way development has > been assisted by working together with the Hebrew language team. Achievements: ------------------ The project has begun as a translation effort. Arabeyes via Anmar Oueja, leader of the Arabic localization effort, has initiated the importing and conversion of the original SGI files to .po files. The translation is then completed through arabeyes.org via a team from King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) at Saudi Arabia. To my good luck I was the leader of the team that time. Without the very generous help of Mr. Pavel Janik, an open-source consultant and leader of the Czech team at OpenOffice.org (http://blog.janik.cz/), who resolved all the issues we met across (localization tools, JCA, builds, ...), we woudn't be able to do the job properly. We reached a 100% translation which is now available with the new version 1.1.3. During the testing face, we reviewed the translation vai 7 different builds for Linux and Windows which you can see here: ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/localization/OpenOffice.org/devel/1.1.3 Screenshots can be found here: http://art.arabeyes.org/OOo?newlang=en_US Courtesy of Pavel Janik Technical issues: -------------------- This is a very important topic. OO.o is still facing many issues with regard to Arabic support. You can find 15 important issues at http://wiki.arabeyes.org/OpenBugs in the OOo section. There are other issues which is not reported yet. Without resolving those issues, I dare say OO.o is not very useful for serious work for the Arabic communtiy. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be with very few developers who work to resolve those issues. Some of the issues are delayed to 2.0 milestone and some even lator. Arabic and Hebrew: ------------------------- In terms of Bidirectional support Arabic and Hebrew face the same problems which is good since a problem solved for one language would automatically serve the other language support. Still, Arabic faces more challenges like shaping/joining which is not needed for Hebrew. Finally: With the many marketing ambitions revealed by OOo, I want to say the best marketing plan to push this open-source suite is to resolve those issues. Please, let us know if this info is not enough or you need something more specific. -- Munzir Taha PGP Key available gpg --recv-keys --keyserver www.mandrakesecure.net F0671821 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 _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
