In the period from 1996 to 2006 Tk Open Systems wrote the specifications and did the testing for Sun Microsystems's support for Hebrew and Arabic in Sun's Java Swing. We developed an exhausitve set of example texts in of right-to-left (RTL) scripts and in mixed right-to-left and left-to-right ("bidi") scripts that test for complete support of both input and display of Hebrew and Arabic text.
In 2002 Tk Open Systems began developing the Hebrew and RTL script support for Sun Microsystems's Open Office and Star Office products. We released the first Hebrew version of Open Office, version 1.1 in April of 2003. Since 2004 our continued development of the Hebrew and RTL support for OpenOffice has been funded by the Israeli Ministry of Finance project "Tehila" (gov.il) inder the direction of Mr. Boaz Dolev.
As an aside, in the years that we have been developing Hebrew support for OpenOffice we have gained rich experience in the internal programming of almost every corner of the OpenOffice source code. In 2005 we put this experience to use when we did the specification and prototype programming for an interface between Daussault Systemes's CATIA CAD/CAM product and OpenOffice's Calc spreadsheet application. This interface allows realtime flow of information between a CATIA model and a Calc spreadsheet. This capability allows engineers to work on an engineering model remotely or offline on a laptop or other platform that does not support CATIA and then to synchronize their work with CATIA when they connect to their CATIA installation.