Hi all, One of the few questions that I invariably come across in in iLUG-Cal meetings is - "When will we be able to write Bangla in OpenOffice ??"
Well, recently, the Fedora developers released a patch that improves the bridge between OpenOffice.org and IBM ICU (the library that does all the heavy duty lifting of rendering complex scripts like Bangla), and I managed to port the fixes that some of us at Ankur Bangla made to Pango (used for rendering text in GNOME) to the ICU code. ... and the net result of this is that you will be able to write Bangla in OpenOffice.org. >From a really broken status (with respect to Bangla), OpenOffice.org is now in such a state that it can even automatically remove the "matra" of "ekaars" and "aikaars" occurring at the beginning of words. I plan to add features such as spell checkers, support for Bangla date fields, etc very soon. Of course, this is not the standard OpenOffice.org that you get with your distribution. While the patches will no doubt make it into the OO codebase at some point of time, I will be releasing a custom made installer for the general public within the next 2-3 days (err... OpenOffice takes around 6 hours to compile on my Athlon XP 2600+ box with 1 GB of RAM - so making a custom release is not very easy). For the time being, you can take a look at the screenshot available at http://sayamindu.randomink.org/gallery/Screenshots/ooo_bn and the PDF of the displayed file is at http://sayamindu.randomink.org/misc/bn.pdf Thanks, Sayamindu -- All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. Seven Pillars of Wisdom -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
