Dear All,
We are about to finalize the feature list of Arabic support for the upcoming major release of OpenOffice (Expected to be released by quarter 1, 2005)

We are quite interested to hear your feedback about
- The quality of the Arabic support in OpenOffice
- What are the features those you like to see in the next release
- What are the annoying Arabic bugs that you would like it to be fixed.

(Please note that we can not add Arabic spell checker as there is no high quality open source Arabic spell checker)

Sincere Regards,
Waleed

I'm not an office user but this critical bug was brought to my attention

copying arabic text from GTK+2 and QT programs (including gnome and KDE programs) and then pasting in OpenOffice 1.1 does not work.

when copying from gtk+ programs you get a series of hexadecimal values like this

\x{064A}\x{062A}


when copying from qt programs you get question marks.

copying arabic text from OppenOffice 1.1 and pasting into GTK+2 and QT programs works fine.

note that when copying from mozilla and pasting into openoffice you get the arabic letters alright but the order of the letters is reversed (this is a mozilla bug not an oppen office one, but the interesting point is you get the letters when pasting from mozilla).

cheers,
Alaa

Thanks Alaa for your valuable comment.

Would please tell me which application you try to copy and paste from (other than Mozilla) ? that would be of great help analyzing/replicating the bug.

Regards,
Waleed

I tested using Katoob and Konquerer
if you want me to try any other app just say so

sorry for not reporting on the oo.o issue tracker, got lost there.

cheers,
Alaa

I use OOo very rarely. I remember two bugs in 1.1

If you export to PDF an arabic document, it works perfectly on linux. You get to see the text and so on. However, if you open the PDF on windows, the text appears as series of circles and boxes.

If you export an arabic presentation from Impress to a Shock wave flash(/flame me privately). The same thing happens as above the arabic text appears as boxes and circles even on linux.

I did experience the bug Alaa complains of too.