On Sun, Feb 08, 2004, Tzafrir Cohen wrote about "Re: Participating in the Open Office
development effort":
>...
> So I have to choose between a difficult-to-install and somewhat
> degregated package, but with the Hebrew speller and Hebrew UI, and
> between my distro's better OOo that has no Hebrew speller.
>
> Are the "Hebrew" parts available as a seperate patch?
Officially, no, as far as I know.
Unofficially, there's a trick that can get Hebrew spellchecking on an English
OpenOffice (see below).
The translated Hebrew UI is especially problematic because supposedly the
strings are compiled into the program, so unless this i18n scheme is changed
by the Sun people themselves, as I understand it, we'll *never* have Hebrew UI
in any of the international distributions' OpenOffice.
In my opinion this makes the Hebrew translation of OpenOffice a cul-de-sac,
a dead-end, but apparently not everyone shares this opinion.
The situation with the Hebrew spell-checker is potentially much easier.
Hspell is included in the Hebrew version of OpenOffice, but in a quite
separate manner. The Hspell dictionary files are included as separate files,
and the Hspell spell-checking code is included as a "shared object" (what
is known as a DLL in the Windows world). In theory, at least, both the Hebrew
and English spell checker could be available in the same distribution, with
minimal space requirements.
Dan Kenigsberg managed to get something almost as good working, following a
tip from "bit" from Whatsup.
The idea is to take the English spell-checking shared-object from a normal
(english) OpenOffice installation, and replace it with the Hebrew spell-
checking shared-object extracted from the Hebrew version, as well as adding
other missing files (the Hspell dictionaries).
Dan produced an RPM,
http://www.ivrix.org.il/redhat/oo-hspell-ugly-hack-0.01-1.i386.rpm
which attempts to do this: copy hspell's support from the Hebrew version of
OpenOffice into the English one. This way, you may spell-check Hebrew documents
while retaining the English User Interface of OpenOffice.
As the name of the RPM suggests, it is an ugly hack, and might not actually
work. It might also depend on your locale, or other factors, so please use
it only if you know what you're doing and at your own risk :)
You must install this RPM *after* openoffice.org is installed, and use --force
in order to overwrite some of the openoffice original files.
Actually, oo-hspell-ugly-hack tries to backup
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/{libspell645li.so,services.rdb} before the
overwrite, but nothing is guaranteed, of course.
--
Nadav Har'El | Monday, Feb 9 2004, 17 Shevat 5764
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I want to live forever or die in the
http://nadav.harel.org.il |attempt.
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