[OOo-Hebrew] detection of Amharic fonts

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hello,

On my work computer i often write texts in English, Hebrew and
Amharic. It is Windows XP (i have no choice about that) and i try to
use OpenOffice when i can; i use MS Word when i have no choice.

Windows doesn't support Amharic out-of-the-box, so i use a program
called Tavultesoft Keyman. The font i use for Amharic is GF Zemen
Unicode (see http://am.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Can%27t_see_the_font%3F
for a download source). There's also Code 2000, but its glyphs don't
look so nice ( http://www.code2000.net/ ).

The problem is this:
To type Amharic i press Ctrl-Alt-G, which enables Keyman. MS Word
somehow detects it and changes the current font to GF Zemen Unicode.
OO doesn't detect it and stays with Arial, Times New Roman or whatever
it is at that time and every time i press Ctrl-Alt-G i need to change
the font manually. When i want to go back to Latin characters, i press
Ctrl-Alt-O, and the same thing happens: MS Word goes back to the Latin
font that was used before Amharic, but OO stays with GF Zemen Unicode
which has terrible Latin glyphs.

I use Ubuntu on my home computer, but i've never succeeded at
configuring it for typing in Amharic, but it's a totally different
problem.

Any ideas? Or should i report it as a requested feature?

Thanks for any help.

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Post by Amir E. Aharoni
To type Amharic i press Ctrl-Alt-G, which enables Keyman. MS Word
somehow detects it and changes the current font to GF Zemen Unicode.
OO doesn't detect it and stays with Arial, Times New Roman or whatever
it is at that time and every time i press Ctrl-Alt-G i need to change
the font manually. When i want to go back to Latin characters, i press
Ctrl-Alt-O, and the same thing happens: MS Word goes back to the Latin
font that was used before Amharic, but OO stays with GF Zemen Unicode
which has terrible Latin glyphs.

I've got to correct myself here:

When i disable Keyman and go back from Amharic to Latin, MS Word
doesn't go back to the previous Latin font, but stays with GF Zemen.

MS Word moves to GF Zemen Unicode not immediately when i press
Ctrl-Alt-G to enable Keyman, but when i press the first letter key. It
probably identifies that it doesn't have a suitable glyph in Times New
Roman and chooses a suitable font. (I don't know why does it choose
*davka* GF Zemen, because i have several other Amharic fonts, but i am
not complaining, because it happens to be the best ...) When i go back
to Latin, MS Word doesn't change the font back, probably because it
does find Latin glyphs in GF Zemen.

In any case, OpenOffice ignores this language change and leaves the
previous font, no matter what.

Is there at least a quick way to change the font back to the default
character formatting in OpenOffice? In MS Word there is Ctrl-Space.
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[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

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,

- yba

Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2007 15:46:56 +0200
Subject: [OOo-Hebrew] detection of Amharic fonts
Hello,
On my work computer i often write texts in English, Hebrew and
Amharic. It is Windows XP (i have no choice about that) and i try to
use OpenOffice when i can; i use MS Word when i have no choice.
Windows doesn't support Amharic out-of-the-box, so i use a program
called Tavultesoft Keyman. The font i use for Amharic is GF Zemen
Unicode (see http://am.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Can%27t_see_the_font%3F
for a download source). There's also Code 2000, but its glyphs don't
look so nice ( http://www.code2000.net/ ).
To type Amharic i press Ctrl-Alt-G, which enables Keyman. MS Word
somehow detects it and changes the current font to GF Zemen Unicode.
OO doesn't detect it and stays with Arial, Times New Roman or whatever
it is at that time and every time i press Ctrl-Alt-G i need to change
the font manually. When i want to go back to Latin characters, i press
Ctrl-Alt-O, and the same thing happens: MS Word goes back to the Latin
font that was used before Amharic, but OO stays with GF Zemen Unicode
which has terrible Latin glyphs.
I use Ubuntu on my home computer, but i've never succeeded at
configuring it for typing in Amharic, but it's a totally different
problem.
Any ideas? Or should i report it as a requested feature?
Thanks for any help.

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Post by Jonathan Ben Avraham
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?

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

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.
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[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 10:00:18 +0200
Subject: Re: [OOo-Hebrew] detection of Amharic fonts

Post by Jonathan Ben Avraham
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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