wine users - Jan 2004 - Font question

And thar's the rub!

The newer office applications have at long last gone over to Unicode. Dagesh, 
the first and for clearness and ease of use, still the better of the 
multilingual WPs never made that step because the parent company died of fear 
of big-bill-gates :-(. I worked on the filters.

Used to be, one exported to RTF and this came into most Word versions 
perfectly. No more--the Dagesh RTF filters were good--I wrote them. But 
Microsoft more or less says: Its our language and you'll use it our way. It 
was a never ending chase of one's tail to keep up with their nonsense.
Dagesh
RTF will no longer go into word or open office or any of them. For the same 
reason as the non-latin fonts will not work  through wine. The newer apps are 
Unicode.

If the winemakers can come up with an interface to solve this problem, please 
do it so that it can be used/packaged under Windows as a simple filter as 
well. Will make a lot of folks happy! For now, HTML export is the only bridge 
to Word et al.

Dagesh is being maintained by Galtech--contact Gadi Doron at 
gadid@galtech.co.il about evaluations copies for such purposes. I have not 
heard about open-sourcing but as one of the developers, I'd go for it--and I
am most probably available (more particulars under private cover).

David Baron wrote:
>And thar's the rub!
>
>  
>
Which one? Give us some context, please.
>The newer office applications have at long last gone over to Unicode.
Dagesh,
>the first and for clearness and ease of use, still the better of the 
>multilingual WPs never made that step because the parent company died of
fear
>of big-bill-gates :-(. I worked on the filters.
>  
>
How does the Unicode problem enter into Dagesh not working on Wine? Wine 
has a non-Unicode API as well, and that supports Hebrew (assuming your 
LC_CTYPE, or LANG, or whatever is set correctly, of course).

Besides the above, as far as I know, Dagesh does not even require Hebrew 
support from the underlying OS at all, so it should work even if Wine is 
compiled without BiDi.
>Used to be, one exported to RTF and this came into most Word versions 
>perfectly. No more--the Dagesh RTF filters were good--I wrote them. But 
>Microsoft more or less says: Its our language and you'll use it our way.
It
>was a never ending chase of one's tail to keep up with their nonsense.
Dagesh
>RTF will no longer go into word or open office or any of them. For the same 
>reason as the non-latin fonts will not work  through wine. The newer apps
are
>Unicode.
>
>  
>
As far as I know, RTF does not store it's stuff in Unicode. Even if it 
does, it's a pretty simple conversion.
>If the winemakers can come up with an interface to solve this problem,
please
>do it so that it can be used/packaged under Windows as a simple filter as 
>well. Will make a lot of folks happy! For now, HTML export is the only
bridge
>to Word et al.
>
>  
>
I think you misunderstand Wine's role in this picture. Wine is not a 
tool to allow Dagesh to exchange things with Word. Wine is a tool to run 
the same ol Dagesh on Linux (and other non-Windows systems).
>Dagesh is being maintained by Galtech--contact Gadi Doron at 
>gadid@galtech.co.il about evaluations copies for such purposes.
>
Thank you. I will. As a general note - next time don't advertise other 
people's email addresses on public lists without their knowledge.
> I have not 
>heard about open-sourcing but as one of the developers, I'd go for
it--and I
>am most probably available (more particulars under private cover).
>
>  
>
I was not too intimately involved with that. As far as I remeber, it 
fell even before it was discussed.

On second reflection - it may not even have been Dagesh after all.

             Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Systems Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/