Hey everyone, I'm Eyal, a LibreOffice project volunteer who does a lot of QA regarding Right-to-Left and Complex-Text-Layout scripts (= written languages). I want to thank thunderbong3 for posting a link to that post - and heartily thank Jonathan Clark, the new RTL-CTL-CJK-focused developer at The Document Foundation, who implemented the performance improvement for Tibetan.
Most bugs we encounter and report in LibreOffice are more general, and aren't script specific (e.g. code which forgets that the content may be right-to-left resulting in wrong behavior in those cases); and a lot of the script-specific bugs are about the most popular script, which is Arabic (that is also used for Farsi, Urdu, Javanese etc.)
But we do have some issues regarding less-commonly-used scripts,
like Tibetan or Mongolian. Here:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115607
is the meta-bug which tracks issues with: Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Zhuang,Kazak, Xibo, Dai, Yi, Miao, Jingpo, Lisu, Lahu, Wa, etc.
We don't know if there are really very few issues specific to those languages (which is quite possible), or whether it's just that they're not used so much and the users aren't motivated enough to file bugs.
Still, as Jonathan's recent fix demonstrates, there is certainly the interest to address them when developer-time-resources become available.
I would like to encourage everyone who cares about these scripts, and "document editing fairness" across countries and cultures, to consider:
1. Try using LibreOffice with such languages which you know at least a little bit of - and if you find any bugs, file them at our BugZilla: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/
2. Consider supproting The Document Foundation, which manages the LibreOffice project, financially:
https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
We are one of the larger FOSS projects in the world, with tens of Millions of regular users (if not > 100 Million) and a board of trustees with members from dozens of countries; but - we don't have large corporations investing money nor time in the project. While a few commercial companies do contribute to LibreOffice (like Collabora and Allotropia) - many fundamental issues are not close enough to their customers' needs - which is why it was decided to hire Jonathan directly to give RTL-CTL-CJK support a boost. Individual user donations are what enables this work.