Office programs

There are now a variety of office suites available for Linux, the two most popular probably being koffice and OpenOffice. OpenOffice has been developed by Sun Microsystems and has an impressive online help system that guides the user through the array of configuration menus. Unfortunately, OpenOffice does not yet support Indian languages, and Oriya in particular, very well. We plan to file bug reports for this. OpenOffice allows entry of the base characters and displays them well, but has problems with conjuncts. They are shown correctly on separate lines, but the display gets garbled when more than one conjunct is typed on a single line. kwrite, the word processor for koffice forms conjuncts correctly, but clips parts of combined glyphs that project above or below the base characters. This might be a problem with the Oriya font that we are using, and we are in the process of investigating this with the help of a GNOME developer.