I am trying to figure out how to enter Hebrew text in an English document in OpenOffice. It does not seem to work. I figured out how to activate Hebrew in my keyboard: setxkbmap -option grp:switch,grp:shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll us,il After doing this, I can type Hebrew into, e.g., Mozilla with no trouble, and it shows up when I type it. In openoffice, I enable CTL and tell it that I want Hebrew to be my CTL language. Then I switch to Hebrew keyboard layout and change my font to Aharoni CLM. Then I type Hebrew characters, and OpenOffice automatically switches into right-to-left mode, but the characters are invisible. Similarly, if I cut-and-paste Hebrew from, e.g., a Hebrew Web site being displayed in Mozilla, into OpenOffice, the Hebrew is invisible. Note: The Hebrew characters do have width, but they're just blank spaces. I tried printing a document with Hebrew and the characters are also invisible in the print-out. I've pulled my hair out about this enough that I'm pretty certain it's an openoffice problem rather than something I'm not doing right, but I'll happily be corrected. I've got version 1.9.109-1.2.0.fc5.
you have the hebrew language pack of he_IL installed I presume ?
I didn't, but I do now (as well as upgraded to 1.9.109-6.2.0.fc5), and it didn't solve the problem. Perhaps I'm confused, but I thought that the langpacks were only for UI elements and spelling dictionaries, not for screen fonts. Also, when I try to do stuff with Hebrew fonts, OpenOffice prints this mesage repeatedly: "--- Couldn't get FontFamily for 'MiscFixed'". I wonder if this is relevant to the problem I'm seeing.
yeah, but it has a depends on some hebrew fonts which I wanted to confirm are installed on you're machine :-)
I have fonts-hebrew installed. It wasn't showing up in the xlsfonts output, so I added it to /etc/X11/fs/config, ran mkfontscale on it, and reloaded my font server. Now the X server can see the hebrew fonts, but Hebrew's still invisible in OO.
Incidentally, shouldn't mkfontscale have been run on the font folder and shouldn't it have been added to /etc/X11/fs/config automatically when I installed the package?
Here's another strange thing.... When I run "xfd" on one of the CLM fonts from fonts-hebrew that I just added to the font server, it only displays the English characters in the font. The "Next" button is disabled, so I can't get to the Hebrew characters. Does this mean there aren't actually any Hebrew characters in the font, or the X server and/or xfs doesn't know how to deal with them, or what?
Sorry to keep tackingon commnts, but.... If I load one of the PFAs from fonts-hebrew into fontforge, it can see the Hebrew characters. So why can fontforge see them but the X server (and seemingly OO as well) can't? Another addendum.... I noticed that if I load the font with the iso10646 encoding rather than adobe-fontspecific encoding, then xfd can see the Hebrew glyphs. So I tried removing the adobe-fontspecific fonts from fonts.scale, reloading my font server, and restarting ooffice, but the Hebrew's still invisible. I suppose I should have mentioned by now that I'm setting my CTL font to Aharoni CLM in Format > Character... and setting the default language fot CTL to Hebrew.
Should give 1.9.112 a spin to see if the new font substitution stuff makes a difference to you, http://www.fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc4/#sn-xwindows describes how to install fonts (the ooo is different note is spurious)
Created attachment 116465 [details] standalone demo source FcPatternAddWeak vs FcPatternAdd, with weak no substition for e.g. David CLM, fine with non weak
caolanm->dcbw: Using FcPatternAdd instead of FcPatternAddWeak on family name gives me hebrew content again. I've checked in this change.
fixed in 1.9.115-1 rawhide, will update fc4 soon