Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

Hi,

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such
> that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was
> told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there
> were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did
> not provide for Hebrew.

I've been writing a lot in Hebrew in OpenOffice, and I can assure you,
in my experience there's virtually *nothing* that OpenOffice is missing
when it comes to Hebrew support. There are free Hebrew fonts (though you can
also use the ones that come with Windows), free Hebrew spell-checker
(of course ;-)), you can format everything properly right-to-left, and
basically all the features, even the most obscure ones, work correctly
in Hebrew: multi-column text, table of contents, index, niqqud, PDF
export, etc.

Many of these features did, at one time in the past, in fact not work
due to bugs, but all the important bugs have fixed, most of them years ago.

Is there anything specific to Hebrew that didn't work for him in
OpenOffice?

> I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted
> he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not
> unique.

Again, I've been using almost any imaginable feature with OpenOffice's
Writer in Hebrew, and everything seems to work, so I wonder what caused him
trouble.

Note that I'm talking about the Writer and MS-Word here - not Impress
and Powerpoint. I do know that people complain that Impress doesn't have
as many feature as Powerpoint - but this is not Hebrew-specific (and not
relevant to the word processor). As far as I'm concerned, all the
features that Powerpoint has and OpenOffice Impress doesn't are
superfluous anyway ;-)

> I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both
> Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good
> Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew
> formatting. Mac users have to buy "niche" packages which do, but
> they do not run on any other platform.

OpenOffice does an excellent job of Hebrew formatting, in my
experience.

Perhaps you're thinking about not doing a good job of displaying
Hebrew "doc" or "docx" files? I haven't seen this as a Hebrew-specific
problem, but I have seen files which didn't look exactly like they
were meant to. But almost always it didn't really matter.


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                     Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I saw a book titled "Die Microsoft
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |Windows". Turns out it was in German...