Request For Comments: Hebrew numbering in Libreoffice

[יוסי צאהן]

Looking at tdf#66212 - Hebrew Numbering incorrect above value ten,

First of all, the current behavior of the 'א ב ג' option is rather useless as I have never seen this numbering used in practice (and yes, I spend my day reading Hebrew texts). I will note however that MS Office supports this numbering as well, so it may be used in some context that I am unaware of.

Secondly, I totaly agree with comment #8.
1. The rendering of a document should not depend on the users locale
2. All numbering systems should be usable regardless off the users preferred locale.

That said, I can hardly understand the point of the "native numbering" menu item. I feel that it is confusing, non-intuitive and should be removed entirely. MS Office does not have such an option and I don't think anyone misses it.

As far as fixing the issue goes - I can see a more than 1 way to fix it.
- The easy way:
Change the behavior of the 'א ב ג' item - as "Maxim Monastirsky" states in comment #3 "The Item 'א ב ג' should act the same as 'Native Numbering'+Hebrew locale".
pros: easy to implement - will change only 2 lines of one file, namely "i18npool\source\defaultnumberingprovider\defaultnumberingprovider.cxx". Will probably also allow the removal of a few unnecessary lines.
cons: 1. changes the semantics of a setting that people may be using. 2. the meaning of this option is not readily apparent from the menu item. 3. will break compatibility with MS Office ODF import.

- The MS way:
as per https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj671735%28v=office.12%29.aspx, MS seem to have added support for another Hebrew numbering format that LibreOffice does not support, it serializes to odf xml as "א, י, ק," and is shown in menus as 'א...י, יא...כ'. This format provides the behavior that people generally want when they choose native Hebrew numbers.
pros: 1. avoiding all cons of first method. 2. retain support for old behavior for those who really want it.
cons: Adding a new number format to LibreOffice seems to involves more work. It will involve changes to more files - including the XML parsing/serialization code.
(Can anyone provide me with pointers to all files that must be updated in order to add a new number format?)

All comments welcome.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20161207/9dfa6897/attachment.html>