LibreOffice 4.0.0 will be released soon, and it’s a good time to summarize its RTL status. Similar to 3.5.0, the RTL work started with LibreOffice conference in October, showing the current state (see LibreOffice RTL status 2012 presentation) and listing the top problems. The main goal of this talk is to raise awareness to RTL issues and recruit developer to help fix them. This was exactly what happened with fdo#44657 which is about Calc not having a scroll bar in RTL user interface. This way RTL bug #1 for almost a year.
In total, version 4.0.0 has 8 bugs fixed (mainly Calc, Presenter Console and toolbars). In addition it has 5 language specific bugs fixed. Full lists are at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/RTL_Bugs#4.0.0 and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/RTL_Bugs#4.0.0_2. Beside working on fixing bugs for the 4.0.0, another focus was put on making sure the fixes are available for the 3.6.x users. This resulted with cherry picking 11 out of 13 bug fixes (part of 3.6.4 and 3.6.5 releases). More fixes are already underway in the master branch, and will also be part of 4.0.1 maintenance release (full list at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/RTL_Bugs#4.0.1).
Beside thanking the core developers for their help (patches, code review), I’d like to thank the guys from The National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies (Motah) at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) in Saudi Arabia, which have joined the RTL team during this release, and their effect is well noticed.
Despite all the work done, we still have a share of RTL bugs for the next release, these are the 7 top priority RTL bugs, any help would be appreciated.
- fdo#33302 Brackets inverted in rtl text (mac only)
- fdo#53030 Calc deletes current sheet, not right-clicked on sheet when trying to delete opposite directionality sheets
- fdo#56403 RTL UI: with RTL locales presentations appear with text align to the right instead of to the left
- fdo#37128 Writer saves text alignment of RTL paragraph not according to the ODF specification
- fdo#44029 docx files with RTL paragraphs aren’t compatible with Word
- fdo#43093 FILEOPEN: [docx] MS Office documents opens with wrong alignment and directionality
- fdo#56408 Brackets are not handled correctly with mixed English/Latin and Hebrew/Arabic texts
Free Software Universe 
LLior, thanks for all your great work!
A specific question: Was the issue of RTL text with diacriticals not appearing correctly ever resolved? I have been sticking with LO 3.5 because of that issue, but would like to upgrade to 4.0. It’s hard to keep track, but if there is any news it would be great to know.
Thanks for you work, I know how important it is for a huge part of the world population.
Personally, I don’t need it. Do I profit in any (technical) way from your work? Did this for example lead to the use of more modern libraries or anything like this?
Keep up the good work!