Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 9:09 am Post subject: Why is OpenOffice concidered "useless" for these F
Why is OpenOffice concidered "useless" for these Font needs?
I quote an e-mail responce to me:
To: Harald Sundt <h_sundt@pop.efn.org>
Subject: Re: The Future of TCC
Dear Harald,
thanks for your e-mail.
Firstly, TibetDoc and TibetD Reader are c applications that are custom coded for Windows. The small size of the Mac and Unix user-base for these applications makes it prohibitively expensive to do the same coding for either of these platforms.
Secondly, we have a version of TibetD Reader that has been coded for the Macintosh and which will run on Windows and Unix/Linux. We make this available for the Mac platform at the moment. Perhaps we will make it available as a single, cross-platform solution later.
The assignment of fonts and characters is controlled in *all* of the programs internally. It has to be that way. We have investigated Open Office as a potential solution. We found it to be useless for our needs. Therefore, we do not support nor recommend Open Office.
I don't understand why your post was posted to the NeoOffice support forum as I don't see any question about NeoOffice. If you have a question regarding NeoOffice, please clarify.
Joined: Nov 28, 2005 Posts: 299 Location: Near Frankfurt/M. Germany
Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 1:04 pm Post subject:
Leo, is it correct, your question is: why you can't use NeoOffice for the purposes you wanted to use it for in connection with that Application (? is it one?) called Tibet Doc?
The answer I personally would grasp from the mail you cite is: TibetDoc has a special way of handling fonts, that makes it incompatible with OpenOffice (as well as with NeoOffice). But that only is what they say. Perhaps you could state here what you want to do, and when people in this forum here know better what exactly the question is, someone might have a better answer (or, maybe there is nothing else than the "NO" you already cited).
T.
Joined: Feb 03, 2004 Posts: 241 Location: Scotland
Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 1:56 pm Post subject:
I understand that the Tibetan language is not yet (?) covered within the NeoOffice/OpenOffice environs. I also believe that TCC are offering a different product rather than integrating into the NeoOffice/OpenOffice project, i.e. it is a different standard. I would find it difficult to believe that you can do e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Lao, Korean and Hebrew but not Tibetan. On the other hand, anybody who produces a product for any of these ancient cultural languages must be congratulated. BTW, there is a special resource centre available here:
http://salrc.uchicago.edu/resources/fonts/available/tibetan/
Since the e-mail Leo quotes does not mention NeoOffice, I would not assume that Leo is talking about NeoOffice. In fact, given that OpenOffice.org X11 does not use native fonts or native Mac OS X text layout functions, it would not suprise me if these particular fonts are mishandled by OOo.
In contrast, NeoOffice uses native fonts and lays out text using Mac OS X's text layout functions. This means that NeoOffice can handle much more complex text layout operations than OpenOffice.org X11 can. For example, NeoOffice can handle character transposition that occurs in Indic languages and can properly insert kashidas in Arabic justified text.
Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 5:56 pm Post subject: Thanks for the Help - I am having...
...enough on my plate to learn the alphabet and syntax.
I know I am CPU and font-handling ways a novice at best.
It just seems irksome the Windows standard is so taken for granted that the desire for a cross-platform alternative is not just seen as cost-prohibative, (hell, I understand that logic, Neo Office is a struggle), but a matter for triage with prejudice.
By the way, the people I was writing are heros, and I am in no way miffed at them. And I thought sending this hassle to NeoOffice Support made sence in that I want to support its effort to be able to compete with the giants.
Joined: Nov 28, 2005 Posts: 299 Location: Near Frankfurt/M. Germany
Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 12:16 am Post subject:
Well, Leo, I think they just are not competing? But isn't it as with everything - Neo could take some advance from this thread: As far as I understood, supporting tibetian language would not be impossible for Neo (other than for OOo!). Such if someone integrated tibetian fonts and someone did a tibetian translation and ....
Did I correctly understand? It would be not a matter of possibility but just a matter of some people wishing and some doing it.
How many powerpc Macs are in use in tibet?
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 1:54 am Post subject:
(this is based on only a few minutes of googlizing)
I think the overarching problem is that Tibetan languages are not supported on Mac OS X in general. The general design paradigm of Neo is to be a bridge between supported Mac OS X languages and OOo...not to provide new input methods, fonts, translations, or the like. When OS X supports Tibetan languages and fonts, then Neo should work without incident (translation aside).
I understand that support of Tibetan languages may be a politically sensitive issue, but unfortunately, until Mac OS X supports the proper encodings and fonts there really isn't much chance that Neo can support those languages.
ed
(OT: I'd mention that personally I think China's occupation of Tibet is a fraud but unfortunately the great firewall and every US president from Nixon onwards would make sure neooffice is totally banned due to political influences...oh wait...)
Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 8:27 am Post subject: Thank You: the developers at Neo, OO, and the TCC are Heros
I wasn't calling the Tibetans heros. Anyone who makes software or anything that enables ordinary people to use technology to improove their lot are the Good Guys, even those at Microsoft.
Please lets not get into Tibet vs China, that just makes for ill will. I am a writer whose inspiration has been Tu Fu, a Chinese poet. Politics makes everything harder.
I do admit I confused the mission of Open Office and NeoOffice as to who ought to do what. My question has been answered.
By the a way Thank You all,... Neo Office has helped me retire Mac OS 9 and WordPerfect without undo suffering.
Now I have to do a survay for MoveOn ...
Leo
While not localized, I suspect that the fonts and keyboards should work without a problem as they're not tied to specific apps. The language may need to be changed manually, however, as I don't think there's any available language code...
The Penn State site is a good resource (although it misses some important "nuances" sometimes and is therefore not always correct); the canonical reference for multilingual Macintosh computing is Tom Gewecke's Your Multilingual Mac.
As for Tibetan, AIUI, it requires glyph reordering like Indic scripts, so you need an AAT font on Mac OS X (like Arabic and Indic script languages). I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure ATSUI includes implementation support for scripts that Apple doesn't supply keyboards and fonts (or sorting routines, dates, and the like) for, so if you can find an AAT font, things should "just work". The only AAT-enabled Unicode Tibetan font comes from XenoType, AFAIK.
OTOH, apps that don't use Mac OS X text layout functions but instead roll their own (e.g. Mellel) *may* support glyph reordering in OpenType fonts, some of which are freely-available for Tibetan.
Things are much better than in the "bad old days" of the classic Mac OS and no Unicode standard, but for many "minor" languages, we haven't reached a "good" level yet
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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