My dad is writing a new book in yiddish. He wrote the previous one with Microsoft Word 2000 and found a few annoying bugs when dealing with rtl text and styles.

I bought a license of MS Word 2003 for him but unfortunately bought it in en-US, completely forgetting that Word is not localizable in another language (yeah, that's called modern software). And he wants a french UI... So I installed Abiword and OOo for him, and tried to configure them for rtl use with a yiddish font.

Results : although its UI is perfectly customizable, Abiword is totally unusable with big documents imported from MS Word. I tried to import a very simple (in terms of styles) 200 pages yiddish document using one single font... The UI freezes so often it's not usable : takes 2 minutes to load, freezes when you resize the window, freezes when you scroll too fast.

OOo has no problem of that sort : loading the doc is fast, and it's easy to work with a 200+ pages doc. The UI customization is too complex, and not easily accessible to newbies ; in my opinion, it should be improved. But OOo Writer is definitely an excellent choice, and my father now uses it.