Anti-rant about final Hebrew letter handling in AbiWord

Today I got my AbiWord installation upgraded from version 2.0.14 to
version 2.2.3. This was one of the several recent upgrades in Debian
Sarge (Testing).

The first thing which I noticed was that version 2.2.3 is again
correctly handling final Hebrew letters (kaf-sofit, mem-sofit,
nun-sofit, pe-sofit and tzadi-sofit).

In previous versions of AbiWord, some smartass decided that final Hebrew
letters need to be automatically shaped like in Arabic. This decision
was implemented without polling Hebrew users of AbiWord.

As a result, it was impossible to type some text sequences, which are in
routine use in Hebrew.

1. In contrast to Arabic, the rules for handling last letter in Hebrew
words are not 100% in effect. There are sevearl special cases.
Examples:
- Catalogue numbers like M-3, N-5 use non-final forms of Hebrew letters
when Hebrew letters are used (like kaf-7, pe-10).
- When used in an acronym, the non-final form of an Hebrew letter is
used even if it is the last letter in the acronym.
AbiWord did not even provide for a way to override its decision to
automatically shape final Hebrew letters.

2. Hebrew keyboards already have all 27 letter shapes - the 22 letters
and also the five final letters. Hebrew language users are used to
using different keys to type the regular and the final forms of the
letters. This is again in contrast to Arabic typists, who need to deal
with all the forms of Arabic letters.
When committing Hebrew to keyboards and computers, the responsible
people simply considered the non-final and final forms of Hebrew letters
to be different.

In short - I am happy to see that gone is the misfeature of automatic
shaping of final Hebrew letters (at least as default behavior).

Good riddance!
                                              --- Omer

-- 
My own blog is at http://www.livejournal.com/users/tddpirate/
My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone.
They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which
I may be affiliated in any way.
WARNING TO SPAMMERS:  at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html