Karl Hong, from Sun., gave a talk on the OpenOffice.org Internationalization (I18N) Framework at IMUG.
Although ICU is a comprehensive i18n API today, it was not mature enough for most of OpenOffice’s development history. So at this point OpenOffice is about 90% custom i18n API and 10% ICU. George Rhoten, from IBM, was available to provide commentary on areas where ICU had matured, for example the calendar features and transliteration.
Karl mentioned that a lot of features in OpenOffice were added to remain competitive with features in Microsoft Office. Unicode normalization has not been a requested or supported feature yet.
After the talk, Karl showed a live demo of OpenOffice rendering and transliterating Simplified and Traditional Chinese. He also showed mixed Chinese and Hebrew BiDi issues. The Japanese search dialog in Impress is pretty amazing to look at.
Thanks again to Apple for hosting the meeting!