About two months after the Israeli government stopped the support for openoffice.org localization, we hit a major bug (actaully – a regression) with version 2.4.0 effecting Hebrew users.
In version 2.4.0 numbers written in Microsoft Word documents are shown as Hindu numbers instead of Arabic numbers. There’s a big confusion in the terms, as the number used in Arabic are the Hindu numbers and the number used in Latin languages are the Arabic numbers.
Anyway, this means that, the facto, Openoffice.org 2.4.0 can’t show properly Microsoft Word documents which were written in Hebrew. I can’t start to describe how much interoperability problems that causes in Israel.
Which such behavior I can’t recommend OO.org to people, and organizations already moved to previous versions of OO.org can’t upgrade to 2.4.0 and must stay with 2.3.1. This is also a problem as most Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora) intend to include 2.4.0 for their stable release.
With all the RTL related bugs, OO.org was still usable. But this bug absolutely changes things. I hope it will be fixed for 2.4.1 and won’t be delayed for version 3.0.
I wish I could say this is an April’s fools post, but that bug is a reality… Please vote for this bug.
