The Help section in my Swedish OOo 2.0.4 version, informed me that I could
input letters from right to left for four languages - Hindi, Thai, Hebrew,
and Arabic - by using Ctrl + Right-shift. Unfortunately, I know none of
these languages, but thought that I might be able to recognise the first
graphs in the Hebrew alphabet. But when I depressed the keys mentioned
above, I found that SCIM, which I use to write Chinese and Japanese, by
default selected a non-CJK language which is written from right to left.
When I changed the default selection to Hebrew (M17N-he-kbd) and typed a-b-c
on my Swedish version of a QWERTY keyboard, with the following results :
שנע
which I must admit was not quite what I had expected. The cursor started at
the extreme left of the page, but the letters were imported from right to
left, i e, first ש, then נ, and finally, ע. It would seem to me that this
method of inserting graphs ought to work for those writing in these
languages....
Moreover, I also found that the ability to write these languages from right
to left was not dependent on using OOo ; once having selected the language
in SCIM, I could do so as easily in this gmail message, which I found very
handy, as it eliminated the need to cut and paste.
The above procedure may not, however, work for those using a Windows machine
('m using Ubuntu) ; in any event I have no experience using SCIM on such a
machine, having always employed Microsoft's own IME system. But as James Su,
the SCIM developer, who is located at Qinghua University in Beijing, has
proclaimed support for as many operative systems as possible as one of the
goals for SCIM, it is not impossible that that supprt for Windows does exist
; I have not, however, been able to find a download for that system....
Henri
PS : For any developers out there, it would also be useful to be able to
type CJK languages from right to left as well, in the event that a simple
keyboard code could enable such a feature....
