Re: Foreign Language with OpenOffice?

[ben <benfoley@rcn.com>]

On Wednesday 05 June 2002 09:13 pm, Kent West wrote:
> Petro wrote:
> >On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 12:45:15PM -0500, Kent West wrote:
> >>Forgive my ignorance concerning internatialization . . . .
> >>At my university our Foreign Language department staff/faculty have
> >>traditionally used WordPerfect throughout the years, along with foreign
> >>language modules from WordPerfect Corp/Novell/Corel for creating German,
> >>French, etc documents and for spell-checking and the like.
> >>Now we come to learn that there is no German language module for Corel
> >>WordPerfect 2002 (and perhaps not other languages as well).
> >>How easy/hard/practical would it be to introduce Open Office for Windows
> >>to them and have that provide the features they need?
> >
> >    Well, since they have to switch to something, OpenOffice (or
> >    StarOffice when the next version is released) would be as good as
> >    any, and better than most.
>
> I appreciate your response. Could any one give me any guidance as to how
> this is done? Do I use the standard OpenOffice (English version) that I
> already have and just do something with locales or with kbd or
> something? Or do I download a special German version of OO? If the
> latter, does that mean the faculty will have to keep three or four
> instances of OO running at any one time? One for English, one for
> German, one for French, etc? Sorry I'm so ignorant of working with
> different languages.
>

you should check out debian-openoffice. internationalization was a bit of an 
issue for a while. last time i looked, there were debs available with user 
interface language support--but not dictionaries--at whichever is your 
favorite from the list at:

   http://www.linux-debian.de/openoffice/mirrors.html

you won't need a separate version for each language but it would be worth 
your while monitoring the oo list for issues that might be significant to 
your particular environment.

btw, staroffice is history, as far as the future is concerned, in that it 
won't be free past the current version. openoffice is better, in any case. 
it's a kick-ass suite that loads any damn document from redmond that you need 
to deal with, and it's as free beer-wise as it is in code.

ben


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