Monthly Archives: July 2011

29/07/2011 · 10:52 am

LibreOffice Conference 2011

The first LibreOffice conference is approaching (12th-15th of October), and I’m very excited about it. I recently sent a talk proposal for RTL issues in LibreOffice.

I guess that most of the developer aren’t aware from personal experience to the RTL issues. And I hope that with this talk I could make them think some more about RTL when they code LibreOffice.

If the talk will be accepted, most of my example are going to be from Hebrew. I’ll be very happy to get help from Arabic speakers so I could show some more issues and examples. If there are other languages that want to join – let me know.

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Filed under LibreOffice, Openoffice.org

20/07/2011 · 6:52 pm

Linux 20th anniversary T-shirts

I’m organizing August Penguin, the yearly free software / open source conference in Israel for and by the community. We celebrate the 10th time we’re holding this conference. I started going to these conferences just after high school, later I got more and more involved and now this is my 2nd year of being the main organizer (with a few others who provide great help).

To celebrate the Linux 20th anniversary and August Penguins 10th anniversary, I thought to print copies of the Linux 20th anniversary T-shirts. I tired to contact the Linux Foundation to coordinate this, but got no response. I’m writing this post to ask for help with finding the people who can approve this printing in behalf of the Linux Foundation.

For those who can read Hebrew, the conference schedule is available at Hamakor’s wiki. The rest are welcome to read the English version (provided by Google translate, so not totally accurate).

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Filed under Israeli Community

13/07/2011 · 8:35 pm

An RTL issue in Ubuntu’s installation

Earlier this week I saw a request for help from the Israeli community to fix an RTL issue in the Ubuntu installation. Although the request is in Hebrew, the screenshots speak for themselves and show the cropped text on the right side of the screen.

There’s a combination of a few problems:

  1. Some of the text has LTR directionality, probably due to sentences beginning with an English word. This could be worked around by some translation changes or forcing directionality with RLM characters.
  2. The text is aligned to the left. This might be due to the sames reasons above. Maybe it’s also possible to override the alignment of RTL languages regardless of the directionality.
  3. The text is cropped on the left side. Seems that just mirroring the English positions isn’t enough to get good results. (I didn’t check the code to see if that’s actually what is done, but that’s one of the common ways I saw to handle support for RTL programs).

LP bug #798768 was reported a month ago, but it seems to repeat LP bug #560114 reported in April 2010. Any help with these issues will be more than welcome. Of course, I’ll be glad to help in any possible way (sorry, I don’t write code) and I’m sure this also applies to the members of the local community.

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Filed under Ubuntu