Re: Anti-rant about final Hebrew letter handling in AbiWord

On Sat, 5 Feb 2005, Omer Zak wrote:

> Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2005 19:27:28 +0200
> From: Omer Zak <omerz@actcom.co.il>
> To: "Developers, AbiWord" <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
> Subject: Anti-rant about final Hebrew letter handling in AbiWord
>
>
> Today I got my AbiWord installation upgraded from version 2.0.14 to
> version 2.2.3. This was one of the several recent upgrades in Debian
> Sarge (Testing).
>
> The first thing which I noticed was that version 2.2.3 is again
> correctly handling final Hebrew letters (kaf-sofit, mem-sofit,
> nun-sofit, pe-sofit and tzadi-sofit).
>
> In previous versions of AbiWord, some smartass decided that final Hebrew
> letters need to be automatically shaped like in Arabic.

Occams Razor: the simplest answer is usually the right one.

The Abiword developers do the best they can with the information available
to them and I'm sure would appreciate more experts in Hebrew providing
feedback.

The abiword develoeprs try very hard but it is important to understand
and not to expect too much. I would encourage you to read this document
if you have not done so already:
http://www.abisource.com/support/expectations.phtml

> This decision was implemented without polling Hebrew users of AbiWord.

Release early release often.
I'm glad you were able to make time to provide feedback on this.

> In short - I am happy to see that gone is the misfeature of automatic
> shaping of final Hebrew letters (at least as default behavior).
>
> Good riddance!
> --- Omer

It would be extremely helpful if you could help out testing nightly builds
or preview releases and help us catch these kinds of problems before major
releases.

It is great that Abiword is able to support users of more complex
languages and developers are not necessarily familiar with these languages
so we really appreciate the feedback.

Thanks for using Abiword.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
Received on Mon Feb 7 17:59:09 2005