Bug#268276: correction
OK, the problem isn't in openoffice, per se. I discovered that the SuSE box
didn't have the culmus fonts properly installed, so OpenOffice was
substituting Lucida fonts. Once the culmus was installed, I got the same
behaviour as on Debian. Maxim Iorsh, the creator of the culmus fonts,
provides the following explanation:
>>>
The font "Frank Ruehl" includes nikud in the most basic sense - it has
character forms comprised of circles and rectangles, which form nikud. It
also has letters with dagesh and some more characters. If a particular
software knows how to retrieve these things from the font file, and how to
position them correctly - it does. For example, KDE knows that nikud comes
under the letter in the middle, TeX knows a bit more, but each of them
applies its own algorithm which may be better of worse. OpenOffice doesn't
apply any algorithm - and you can see the result.
But there is another approach. Under this approach (OpenType technology), the
font tells the software which algorithm is to be used. In this case, the
software doesn't need to know anything about nikud, but it must know to
retrieve the algorithm from the font and to apply it. OpenOffice knows how to
do that, and Lucuda uses this technology, therefore OpenOffice can use the
algorithm supplied by Lucida and position the nikud correctly. On the
contrary, my fonts don't use this technology (this is what I meant under "not
supported"). So you can consider diacritics to be an "undocumented feature":
if one knows how to deal with it - good for him, if one doesn't - too bad.
<<<
So I guess this bug should probably be made wishlist severity, against either
OpenOffice or culmus. But I leave these weighty decisions to those who
actually understand Debian policy. :)
Hope this helps!
--Itai
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