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?"

Comments

Re:Why AREN'T you using Windows???

[Otter]

You know, it seems like there are a lot of reasons you OUGHT to be using Windows. So why aren't you?

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?

Suck it down.

[FFFish]

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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KDE2

[abelsson]

KDE has excellent i18n support, probably the best of all unix desktop enviroments. It also provides most of what you need in a desktop enviroment.. I belive KDE has full support for unicode and right-left writing. So if you absolutly must avoid MS, i'd look into KDE. http://www.kde.org/il/hebrew/ is the page devoted into translating KDE into hebrew.

[taken from that site]
Version 2.0 of KDE featured several improvements in the field of Hebrew support in its interface. Among these improvements:

• KDE is now based on Unicode. There is no longer a need for special fonts for Hebrew.
• The translation of KDE applications is complete. Every part in the interface of KDE applications is translated into Hebrew, including all of the menus, messages, and quick help. All of the applications in the kdebase, kdeadmin, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdepim, kdetoys and kdeutils packages are available translated into Hebrew.
• The Konqueror web browser which comes with KDE supports displaying any type of Hebrew on the web, including logical Hebrew. However, all other KDE and KOffice applications do not yet support logical Hebrew.

  -henrik

How about createpdf.adobe.com?

[victim]

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 www.freeviewer.com

[kervin]

or try www.freeviewer.com

Gnome Pango

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:Gnome Pango

[LionKimbro]

There's a screenshot of the right-to-left capabilities of Pango on their web page.

Specifically, Hebrew and Arabic text, right-to-left, appear in the middle of the document.

I've been in your situation

[firewort]

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

Apple

[sulli]

Mac OS 9 supports Arabic and Hebrew very simply. I don't read or write either (I wish!) but my Arabic-speaking sister and Hebrew-speaking mom both tell me that it works fine. From Apple's web site:

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...

Well...

[Hiro Antagonist]

Here's a couple of links for you:

• 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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