Tk Open Systems began developing the Hebrew version of OpenOffice in the spring of 2002. This project was the second major project that we did for Sun Microsystems. The first project was Hebrew and Arabic support for Sun's Java Swing programming environment.
The Hebrew OpenOffice project has been funded by the Israel Ministry of Finance Online Government Project (called "Tehilla") since 2004, under the direction of Mr. Boaz Dolev.
The technical challenge of the project has been to integrate support for input and display of righ-to-left (RTL) scripts and mixed RTL and left-to-right (LTR, or Western scripts) into the existing OpenOffice source code. The changes required to support RTL and mixed scripts affect the most basic elements of the source code. Since there are several million lines of source code in OpenOffice, it has been a major challenge for us to locate and learn the code that we need to modify for Hebrew support.
Most of the work that Tk Open Systems has done to support Hebrew in fact supports the other RTL scripted languages as well, especially Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Syriac. All of the source code changes that we make to support Hebrew are donated back to the OpenOffice community through the OpenOffice.org web site. From there they find their way into the OpenOffice versions in various operating systems such as the Linux distributions Debian and Ubuntu, and the NeoOffice product for the Macintosh.
We are currently producing two releases of Hebrew OpenOffice per year. These versions are available from openoffice.org.il a Hebrew site operated by Tk Open Systems for the Israel Ministry of Finance and Sun Microsystems for the benefit of the Hebrew OpenOffice user community. The version of OpenOffice that we produce differs from the version available on OpenOffice.org in that the user interface, page size and writing direction defaults are set for Hebrew on installation. In addition, we bundle the Culmus Hebrew fonts and some other local content with our version.