Re: [oic] interoperability and non-latin scripts

Hi Bart,



I'm sorry, so late response for this mail. I just come back from China Spring Festival Holiday for a short time, as well as busy in other dev work, so till now have time to process the mails in this mailling group.



As to special interoperability issues from non-latin scripts, what I can see now is listed here, which current ODF major products only support some of them, for members' information:



(1)Character encoding issues. For example, although many Chinese documents use Unicode, but still many of Chinese documents are encoded by China national standard GB18030 or the older national standard GB2312. This needs ODF applications to support these special encodings so that can show Chinese documents correctly.



(2)Special Asian layout issues. For example, these Chinese specific feature may bring interoperability issues: Asian phonetic text, text in special symbol, text writing direction(horizontal/vertical),character combination,line combination,table wrapped around text,paragraph vertical alignment, bitmap background text, text grid layout, text letter layout, etc.



(3)Font issues. Non-latin countries have their own font sets, such as China Simsun font. Generally this is not ODF application issues,and depends on whether the specific fonts are installed on OS or not. But for end users, document interchanging between different OS with different font set installed will surely bring interoperability issues.



(4)Mapping between different document format standards. For example, in the area of Office document format, China has its own national standard called UOF,there are many feature differences between UOF and ODF, e.g. UOF1.0 has no 3D shapes, forms,Spreadsheet subtotals, consolidate, data pilot, database front end, as well as only has general description but no clear definition for digital signature. Maybe these kinds of issues generally are not covered by OIC TC, but since China local UOF applications may implement ODF, and because of the above feature differences, there may exist ODF interoperability issues.



(5)Document template issues. Here document template is the fixed form document for specific usage. Asian countries,especially China may have different document templates than the latin document templates even the usage may be the same. Some features for China document templates may not be needed for latin document templates,so may not be defined in ODF.



(6)Bi-di algorithm for RTL languages. This is not for Asian countries, but for Arab,Hebrew,Thai,etc. According to my personal development experience, Bi-di issue is always challenging for ODF applications.



Besides the above non-latin language specific issues, I also would like mention one important feature that may bring interoperability issues: Macros. We know current ODF has no clear definition about macros. However, the real applications may have different languages as their macros,e.g. StarBasic, VBA,JavaScript,Python,BeanShell,and even a China local Office product Evermore Office use Java as the macro language.



Just throw my 2 cents:)


Best Regards,



Mingfei Jia(樂隴滄)

IBM Lotus Symphony Development

IBM China Software Development LAB, Beijing

Tel: 86-10-82452493   Fax: 86-10-82452887

NOTES:Ming Fei Jia/China/IBM   E-mail: 

Address: No.28 Building, Zhong Guan Cun Software Park, No.8 Dong Bei Wang West Road, ShangDi, Haidian District, Beijing 100193, P.R.China 


"Hanssens Bart" ---01/22/2009 01:16:40 AM---Dear Mingfei,







From:

"Hanssens Bart" <>




To:

Ming Fei Jia/China/IBM@IBMCN




Cc:

<>




Date:

01/22/2009 01:16 AM




Subject:

[oic] interoperability and non-latin scripts








Dear Mingfei,





First of all thanks for joining the call. These conference calls are

very late in the evening in your time zone, so it's really appreciated

that you are willing to do this.



One thing I have to keep remind myself is that most people on our

beloved planet are in fact using non-Latin based scripts (like Hanzi,

Devanagari, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai...)



Could you perhaps tell us if there are interoperability issues in Asia

that often go unnoticed in Europe/USA ? (Maybe Aslam could tell us

something about South-Africa, I have no clue on what scripts are used by

the different languages in Africa)



Like applications not supporting different writing directions, issues

with calendar formats,  or perhaps features not implemented in ODF at

the moment (so that applications have to work around it by using special

attributes) ?





Thanks





Best regards,



Bart Hanssens





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