Open source software developers last month completed the adaptation into Cyrillic and Latin Serbian alphabets of the third version of the OpenOffice suite of office applications. The project is supported by the ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society.
The localisation project was presented two weeks ago in Belgrade.
The adaptation of the software into Serbian was carried out by the Serbian society for OpenOffice, open source volunteers and the Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade. The Serbian versions of OpenOffice are made available for free for computers running Microsoft Windows and or GNU/Linux.
The localisation helps to remove obstacles to understanding OpenOffice, explains Goran Rakic, one of the developers at the Faculty of Mathematics. "It makes it easier to use the software."
The developers also built spell checking software that can handle both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet, parse words into syllables and automatically recognises which language is used in a document. Rakic: "We have received very positive feedback on this from users trying to learn Serbian."
The group is now working on localising document templates meant for small and medium sized businesses.
The OpenOffice suite is one application in a list of open source software that the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society wants to see localised. The ministry got involved with OpenOffice version 2.4. According to the Serbian society for OpenOffice their localised version of the office applications suite has been downloaded more than 30.000 times.
Earlier this year, the Serbian government explained that the adaptation of open source software should help to accelerate the development of an information society in Serbia. Making open source software available is also a way of fighting software piracy.
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