In the last few years the Israeli government founded some work on openoffice.org by
Tk Open Systems Ltd. During the years, the work has resulted with an Israeli version , released after the official release and includes a lot of patches to improve support for Bidi and Hebrew specifically. Although most patches were submitted to the hamburg , a lot of them weren t used and are still waiting for inclusion.
The funding the that projects stopped a year ago (9/2009), and the last release of the Israeli version is 3.1.1. Since then we had a quiet period in which 3.2 and 3.2.1 were released. While still enjoying the fruits of the projects in these version, it seems that it s time for the community to take over, as we lost hopes for yet another funds from the government.
In may Netanel and I started talking about taking over the Hebrew translation, and in June we got Hebrew added to the openoffice.org pootle server. We started with about 80%, and got to 86% in time to get to the list of languages getting a language pack built for. This was a first achievement as Hebrew didn t have a language pack since early on the 2.x versions. I believe that working as part of the openoffice.org l10n group and with openoffice.org release schedule will only benefit for the Hebrew translation process.
We used the language pack to test the translation and improve it. We also were able to get to 89% with the help of more volunteers.I believe it s now much more consistent than before. In the process with manually checked Writer thoroughly, while Calc and Impress got less attention due to the time frame. But we fixed some major translation issues in all of the three components.
While testing the translation we also started to report Bidi issues we saw in 3.3 beta, hoping they will be fixed for the final release. For example, the main openoffice.org screen on windows has is getting repainted wrongly when moving the mouse over the options (text, spreadsheet..). This looks very badly as this is the main screen! See issue
#97556 for details
In RTL UI the main screen doesn't get repaited properly.
In addition to report new issues, we also started to keep track of the already opened issues regarding Bidi and Hebrew. I m following the issue system for a few years now, but seeing the list of issues organized in the wiki gave me a better orientation in the problems we have. E.g. finding some related or similar issues and mention each other in the comments, when someone goes to first one, he could also fixed the other as the problem is similar and probably comes from the same code.
Organizing also the already closed bugs in 3.x, gave me a some kind of a changelog for the Bidi and Hebrew related issues. In that manner, version 3.1 was a very good for Bidi, thanks for a lot of efforts and work with the Bidi meta issue
#79434. The wiki page is in Hebrew, but looks quite OK with Google translate (see
here).
Hoping to have 3.4 a major release (Bidi wise), I ve opened issue
#114236 as another meta issue for Bidi related issues. I ve kept Hebrew specific issues out, as to get it more general and also relevant for Bidi users in other languages. Any help of those issues will be more than welcome (starting with votes and ending with patches).
Filed under:
i18n & l10n,
Israeli Community,
Openoffice.org