Re: [OOo-Hebrew] detection of Amharic fonts

On Sun, 4 Feb 2007, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:

> Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 10:00:18 +0200
> From: Amir E. Aharoni <[email protected]>
> To: OpenOffice Hebrew mailing list <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [OOo-Hebrew] detection of Amharic fonts
> 
>> Hi Amir,
>> This sounds like the type of featue we would be willing to consider.
>> Please file a feature request in http://bugzilla.openoffice.org.il.
>
> Thanks for the quick response.
>
> I use OO v2.1 international, not Hebrew. Should i file it at org.il or
> at the main international site?

Hi Amir,
This is not something that the mainline developers can handle at this 
point. This feature would be in the TkOS version only, for reasons that 
you yourself note correctly below...

> As for the problem itself - i thought about it a little more and it
> seems that the root cause of it is the inflexibility of "Options ->
> Language Settings -> Languages". It allows one Western language, one

Correct. The OOo assumption is that you have one default Western language 
and one default CTL language. Why differentiate at all? Because the 
non-Western language support (CTL) drags in a whole lot of other code that 
slows OOo down and the developers felt that it was inappropriate to tax 
Western user with this code when they don't need it. So they made the 
distinction.

Furthermore, the developers assumed that even if you use a CTL language, 
you use only one. For most users in the Far East this is correct. I spent 
many hours taking Canadian, Korean and Chinese developers visiting 
TKOS from Sun Microsystems and IBM on tours of customer sites in Israel 
where they saw folks using English desktops with Hebrew and Russian or 
Hebrew and Arabic word processing. Some users we saw had as many as four 
languages that they use in the course of a day's work. This multi-language 
use is limited to few small geographic areas - Israel, Lebanon, Malta, 
Hong Kong etc. It was completely surprising to our visitors.

> Asian language and one CTL language. Even the usage of the word CTL is
> problematic - most Israelis don't know what CTL means and don't know
> that Hebrew is a kind of CTL. Probably there should be some default

Admittedly. Most people, Israeli or not, also wouldn't knwo why there is a 
need to distinguish between CTL and non-CTL. This is a kludge, as noted 
above.

> font for every language, like in Mozilla (Mozilla's GUI for font
> selection is very bad, but at least it is flexible).

There is a default font for every language defined in XML files. We can 
change the default in the local edition if there is a free font that we 
can distribute with the edition. Not a big deal and if it would help the 
Ethiopian community then we'll do it.

>
> Come to think of it, maybe OO can try to detect whether IE and/or
> Mozilla are already installed at the same machine and get the font
> definitions for every language there to save time for the user.

Now that's a great idea but a bit out of the scope of the Hebrew OOo 
budget for 2007.

   - yba



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