Comment 420 for bug 1

On 24/07/07, Paul Flint <email address hidden> wrote:
> Dear Amir,
>
> Are you having trouble operating Ubuntu in Hebrew? I would refer you to:
>
> sudo apt-get install language-pack-he
> https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-l10n-he/+members
>
> Note that I do not speak Hebrew, so I would be interested and attentive to
> your results.

Thanks for the link.

As far as i am concerned, the worst bug in Ubuntu (a big bunch of bugs
really) that seriously hurts its adoption in Israel is that OpenOffice
very often opens documents in Hebrew quite badly, especially if they
have tables or other tricky formatting.

It's really stupid, but when people email each other jokes and
beautiful pictures in PPT or DOC format and they can't see them
correctly, it really bugs them and they dismiss Ubuntu immediately.

Translating OpenOffice's menus doesn't fix that (i contributed a few
translations myself).

There's also another problem - some important Israeli websites are
IE-only in a very bad way. I didn't have to resort to IE for any
non-Hebrew website since about 2004, but in Israel it's still a
catastrophe. I occasionally email the webmasters, trying to remind
them that there are some people that don't use Windows, but they
rarely bother to reply, let alone fix their sites.

OpenOffice and Firefox are not Canonical products, but they are
(rightly) part of the core default installation and that's what most
users see and use. Can Canonical do something about it?..