On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 1:12 AM, Pedro Giffuni <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Donald; > > --- Mar 13/3/12, Donald Harbison <[email protected]> ha scritto: > >> Da: Donald Harbison <[email protected]> >> Oggetto: Transliteration Font Support of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 and beyond... >> A: [email protected] >> Data: Martedì 13 marzo 2012, 21:14 >> I'm looking for advice on the current >> state of transliteration support in OpenOffice. Is anyone >> familiar with this issue? My Dad is a Sanskrit scholar, now >> 98 years old. Some of his manuscripts were authored in >> WordPerfect circa 1985 with special macros to enable him to >> do the transliteration from Sanskrit to Roman alphabets >> prior to publication. It appears that OpenOffice 3.0 had >> support for specific Unicode fonts supporting >> transliteration. >> > I don't know anything about India and it's languages > but I found this while hunting the Chrome fonts: > > https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/ > >> It would be great if the community would focus >> some effort on academic publishing requirements such as >> this. There are other aspects to this space that we can >> attend to which could create some exciting value for >> scholars who have crappy tools today. For example, >> integration of the R statistics package http://www.r-project.org/ >> ... just a thought. We may have some licensing challenges >> but if we think about how valuable this could be...well. >> there must be a solution, right? >> > Yes, this has been proposed in a bugzilla issue > https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=66589 >
It is an interesting idea. Some programs, like the Gnumeric project, have added a considerable amount of more advanced statistical support directly into their spreadsheet, more than OpenOffice, more than Microsoft Office, more even than LibreOffice. But they obviously still have only a fraction of what is in R. You can never beat R. But doing fine grained interchange with R, within a spreadsheet calculation cycle, is probably a killer for performance. But there are some things you can do that do perform well. For example, ODFWeave gives a way to treat an OpenOffice document (or any ODF document) as a template that this then filled out based on R's calculations and charting. I could see it being useful for automating laboratory reports, for example. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/odfWeave/index.html Also, I wonder if there is anything more we can integrate from the COIN project? That was Eclipse license, right? They had non-linear constraint solving, etc. Quadratic programming would be another good one. But still, it is a trade-off. The more capability we bring to Calc, the bigger it becomes. We need a way to grow without growing. Modular extensions, not just at the UI level, but at the computational level. Another thing I hear from academics is the desire to have much improved bibliographic support in Writer. > I would personally favor some VBA macros in the > lines of software like Minitab. > I'm not sure I understand. VBA macros in AOO that can call an automation interface in Minitab? > Hth, > > Pedro >
