[A12n-forum] Improvements in OpenOffice.org 2.3 for Africa

[F Wolff <viool@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi list

I just saw that these improvements are mentioned for OpenOffice.org 2.3
that concern Africa:

Locale data was added for 
 * Hausa_Ghana (ha_GH)
 * Ewe_Ghana (ee_GH)
 * Lingala_Congo (ln_CD)
 * Sango _ Central African Republic (sg_CF)
 * English_Ghana (en_GH)
 * Ganda_Uganda (lg_UG)

The last four were the results of the work at the Pan African
localisation workshop in Marrakesh. I guess the first two Ghanaian ones
are the work of GhanaThink (can somebody confirm?).

These locales are now available as a default document language and
selectable for number formats. 

Default currency Ghana Cedi, GHS, for *_Ghana (ak_GH, ee_GH, en_GH,
ha_GH) locales.

Also somewhat of interest
 * the possibility to spell check single letter words

 * the addition of an automatic language guessing component. I have not
yet tried it out. In terms of African languages, I only see information
for Afrikaans, Amharic and Swahili. It is derived from Textcat:
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/TextCat/
This was developed / integrated for OpenOffice.org during Google's
Summer of Code. I don't know if it would be sufficient to contribute to
the TextCat project for future integration into OpenOffice.org.  

For those interested interested in the technical details, this works by
using an N-gram fingerprint, not a spell checking dictionary.


Regards
Friedel Wolff