[OOo-H] [Fwd: Request: Behaviour on weak characters in mixed directional environment]

[Shoshannah Forbes]

(Forwarded with permission)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Request: Behaviour on weak characters in mixed directional 
environment
Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 14:33:15 +0200
From: Falko Tesch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Jonathan Ben Avraham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,   Shoshannah 
Forbes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Waleed Hosny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,   Frank 
Meies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED], 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Hi All,
in the successor of OO.org 2.0 we must address the issue of the
direction of weak characters.
This mail refers to IssueZilla issue 18024.
for the moment we have to options to deal with the direction of weak
characters in OO.org's next release (after 2.0)
1. Behave like MS Office does and determine the direction by reading out
the locale of IME used to input the weak character. So any weak
character input with a R2L locale will be R2L and vice versa.
Pros:
o 100% compatibility with MS Office documents that use BiDi text.
o Same behaviour like MS Office on BiDi text when inputting
Cons:
o Currently only Windows IME report their locale, Unix' IMEs don't.
  Result: OO.org for Windows will behave differently to OO.org for
          Unix
o Apparently the MS Office method is not correct under all circum-
  stances, so we will copy MS bugs into OO.org

2. Behave like suggested in issues 18024 by introducing a modification
to the Unicode standard.
Pros:
o Better and more correct input on weak characters, beating MS Office
o Being independent from IME capabilities since no read-out is necessary
Cons:
o Not compaible to MS Office file format
o Not compatible to MS Office input
Given that MS Office has a market share of well above 90% in all markets
in question the MS Office interoperability< becomes a very serious issue
we must address.
What we (Star Office) can think of for the moment is to implement an
additional compatibility flag that treat MS Office documents correct on
import and export.
When opening a OpenOffice.org document we will use the enhanced version
of Unicode input.
But that would mean that, whenever editing a MS Office document, the
user will experience a different way of input compared to a native document.
Furthermore under Unix the input also might be completely off since we
have no locale support under these OS IMEs.
so basically what we must discuss here is a viable solution for all
stakeholder - and that's you, guys :o)
Please state your suggestion and best compromises you can think of.
Thank you very much in advance.
Regards
Falko Tesch

--
Falko Tesch                                   Tel: +49 40 23646 883
Product Manager                               Fax: +49 40 23646 550
User Experience
Sun Microsystems GmbH
Sachsenfeld 4                                  mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
D-20097 Hamburg                       http://www.sun.com/staroffice
--
http://www.xslf.com
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