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Living In A Microsoft Country (And Speaking The Language)?
WinterKnight asks: "I live in a country that's completely under Microsoft domination. My system, runs a non-Microsoft OS (lets just say its not a UNIX variant, and yes, it's a PC). It's hard. Really hard. Especialy when most e-mail from people arrive as a MS-Word attachments, or they use Excel for making even a silly, simple list of items. Its also hard when 90% of the web sites from that local country are 'designed for IE5+ and above'. What makes it even more difficult is that Netscape has difficulty reading the language, because the format is also IE-only. The country I am refering to is Israel. Microsoft seems to have it locked up here because of Hebrew, which isn't only a diffrent set of fonts, but is also written backwards - from the right to the left. Very few systems other then Windows have support for that. Mine doesn't fully support it as well, either. Living like this is very hard, and I keep asking myself if maybe I should just give up and be 'one of the crowd'?" Localization in Linux is improving, but how close is total Linux support for languages like Japanese and Hebrew that are difficult to fit into your normal, left-to-right, single byte character infrastructure?
"I am well aware that once I do something like this, I'll probably begin to neglect the computer and like it a lot less, because for me it will mean the loss of my freedom. I've never liked Windows, and for a reason. But this freedom keeps costing me a hard price of being 'not compatible' with just about all of the computing resources available. Linux does have programs that can read Word and Excel files, but unfortunately, they can't read Hebrew Word and Excel files. Same goes with the 'IE Hebrew standard' for HTML.
So, here I am, asking the Slashdot community. What can I do?"
Rami,
Both (Linux and *BSD) runs KDE with konqueror fine, and you can read 98% of Israeli web pages just fine (whatever they are logical Hebrew or Visual Hebrew).
You can also use the Mozilla which you can download from IGLU web pages an d use it to watch the Hebrew pages..
As far as typing in Hebrew - go to the IGLU pages and you can find there a suite of RPM's which are called "freebidi" which lets you type and use applications like XCHAT and other programs which uses the XDrawString - and get normal hebrew.
Hetz (Heunique)
Don't let your OS choice be a political issue, it a matter of what you need your computer to do. If only Windows fits that need, then use it.
This is one thing that always irritates me on /. You have a bunch of people saying that you should just choose the product that works best, regardless of who makes it. Then you have a bunch of people saying that if you don't like the way a certain corporation does business, don't buy their products. These two views are mutually exclusive, yet I hear them both uttered by the same people fairly often.
What it comes down to is that the choice of OS or any other product can very well be based on concerns other than whether the product does what you need it to do. We can't just surrender our beliefs and conscience over to unfettered capitalism and support corporations with our money regardless of how they do business or the kinds of practices they engage in. To ignore immoral acts by a corporation when they come to light and support that corporation with your money is to offer tacit support for their actions. Many people can't stomach such a thing. Too bad there aren't more people like that.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The Macintosh has arguably even better support for top-down or right-to-left foreign alphabets than Windows. Also, you can run the MS applications (Word and whatnot, including IE) on it.
And if you would like to have the power of UNIX, OS X will enable you to run things the proper *nix way. True, you'll have to wait maybe 6 months until Hebrew support is finished, and of course that you'll have to buy new hardware, but by that time you may find that you're in the market for a new machine anyway.
In a relatively short time, there will be a BSD based OS with applications relevant to the documents you are trying to process, and support for Hebrew.
"Perfect numbers like perfect men are rare." -Descartes
Or I could suggest you get a Mac, and have access to better versions of Office and IE than Windows users have. Or I could suggest Linux, and tell you about the great bidirectional language support in Qt/KDE, the work in progress on Pango and the Ivrix project for Hebrew and Arabic support in Linux.
But I have no idea what your question is. You're using some other OS that you won't name and you're having trouble with Word documents? What kind of solution are you expecting?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Face facts: Microsoft has chosen to fully support the Hebrew language. Other OS and applications companies have not. Microsoft wins this round, fair and square: you can hardly decry them for being open-minded enough to realize that a global OS/global application needs to support global languages.
There's no end to the bad things that can be said about Microsoft.
Poor internationalization isn't one of them.
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[taken from that site]
Version 2.0 of KDE featured several improvements in the field of Hebrew support in its interface. Among these improvements:
-henrik
When some numb-nut sends me a document in Word or Powerpoint of whatever and my open software won't open it I just send it up to http://createpdf.adobe.com and they mail back a nice PDF of it.
They let you do three documents as a trial, then its $10/mo or $100/year.
They handle many of the popular but proprietary formats.
And for goodness sake, stop reading slashdot and get out and VOTE!
or try www.freeviewer.com
Check out the Pango project over on the gnome web pages. They apparently plan to incorporate support for all those funky languages that go up and down, right and left, diagonally, or however.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I lived in Tel-Aviv for two years, and still support my in-laws computer there.
I know *exactly* what you're going through.
If you're looking at linux as an alternative, GTK2 is going to have right-to-left support, and KDE2 has it.
Web browsing is perfect at handling msIE html and their version of Hebrew, if you use Konqueror.
I believe Kword works for editing the Hebrew, but I haven't tried it recently enough to remeber how well it does right to left text entry.
Have you gotten in touch with the Linux User Groups in Israel? You have two: Haifux and IGLU.
go to www.iglu.org.il and join the e-groups list. They have lectures now and again, given in Hebrew, both at Technion and Tel-Aviv University.
As for the email attachments, half the time Outlook Express in Hebrew in windows on my machine can't read emails generated by OE on another machine.
My machines are running:
win98 Hebrew-enabled,
Mandrake 7.2 (KDE2 has the hebrew fonts already in it... hebrew is an install option for a completely localized system)
and MacOsX public beta. the full release will have hebrew as an option for localization.
My wife's laptop runs win98 localized hebrew. someday when I get the energy, I'll make her an x-client and spawn the display of my kde2 to her machine.
I've always been surprised that Linux hasn't taken off wildly in Israel-- I expect that when right-to-left wordprocessing and presentation composing is complete, that people will jump to linux in Israel, because of its free nature.
(Many Israelis 'warez' MS products, so much so that last year Microsoft threatened to stop localizing for Hebrew languages unless the piracy diminished. I remember reading that news item at www.globes.co.il)
You CAN do everything you want to do, in Hebrew, without MS.
b'hatzlecha!
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Multilingual support. Mac OS is world-ready. Input, display, edit and print a variety of Latin-based languages in addition to Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Indian, Japanese and more.
Of course, using Apple doesn't exactly free you from MS documentation...
sulli
RTFJ.
- Mozilla with some Hebrew extensions.
- Somethinng from the IGLU FAQ, with links on places to find Hebrew fonts and keyboard support.
- Some common Linux applications with Hebrew support.
Hope that helps! As far as the Word® documents and Excel® spreadsheets, I would ask your friends and co-workers to convert them to another format before sending them to you, or run Wine and emulate Office2000 (which works fairly well). That's what I do (although I only need to contend with English and German)--
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