Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 53896
Punctuation not recognized correctly in Right-to-Left paragraphs
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:08:39 UTC
When I enter English words in right-to-left (e.g., Hebrew) paragraphs, I expect them to appear left-to-right. This works most of the way, except of I want to use punctuation marks as well. For instance, I would like to be able to write things like "main()", and have the braces appear to the right of the word main, and not to the left. MS Office behaves correctly (or at least, more intuitively) on this. Maybe it's not a bug per se, and this recognition is done by design. But in that case, how do I include things like code examples in the middle of Hebrew text? To recreate the bug: 1. switch a paragraph to R-t-L direction. 2. write something like "main()". Watch the braces appear to the left of the word main. Possible fix: Currently, it appears that any sequence of English letters and punctuation marks beginning and ending with an English letter is handled as a Left-to-Right sequence. (in Regular expression parlance, that's /:letter: (:letter:|:punct:)*:letter:/). This must be changed to /:letter: (:letter:|:punct:)*/.
Reassigned.
Tested on PowerBook 10.3 running NeoOffice J/1.1 This issue relies on the right to left paragraph alignment option that we were only able to find in NeoOffice J/1.1, this may not be Steps to reproduce 1.) Create a new presentation 2.) Type a word like main 3.) Then add any of the following punctuation marks “~`!@#$%^&*()_-+={}[]|\;:’â€<>,.?/†NOTE: marks are on the right of the word 4.) Right click on the text area and select Paragraph (or click Format->Paragraph) select the alignment tab and change the properties from left to right to right to left 5.) At this point the punctuation marks should be placed on the left side of the word main However, punctuation can be placed to the right of the word if you move the cursor to the last character (farthest to the left) and type the punctuation it will appear on the right side of the word main. Now this functionality may not be a bug but is very confusing from an interface standard since it is possible to scroll to the left and then end up in the right side of the screen on the same line. The controls themselves are also confusing since when you change the paragraph alignment settings to right to left the left arrow moves the cursor to the right and the right arrow move the cursor to the left. This issue may also occur in other portions of NeoOffice like Writer since it too also deals with paragraph alignment. So the previous steps can be used to check wheather Writer has a similar issue. This issue couldn’t be replicated on OpenOffice 1.2 on the same PowerBook or On Windows XP SP2 OpenOffice 1.9.125 (English) since the right to left paragraph alignment couldn’t be found. The issue is not critical but it does seem to cause confusion and what would seem like undesired behavior for those who use it; so it’s probably something that should be looked into since this creates a confusing user interface, for anyone who wants to use the right to left alignment feature. Steve Wu and Jacek Leowski
Here are the steps to make the right-to-left paragraph option visible in OpenOffice 1.9.79.2 (actually, I think that the fact that these steps are necessary at all is a bug on its own accord). 1. open Tools|Options 2. go to Language Settings|Languages 3. in "Default languages for documents", there is a combo box labeled "CTL". Select "Hebrew". 4. close the Options dialog 5. Now locate the Formatting toolbar. 6. Click the small triangle at the bottom-right corner of the toolbar - the Right-to-Left and Left-to-Right buttons can be selected.
Set to new and change the target.
I can reproduce the bug. Please have a look.
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".