ICT Research and Training Portal - DGF Article

Introduction
OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org is the Open Source project of StarOffice productivity suite from Sun Microsystems. It is a unified, cross-platform, globalized Unicode-based suite of productivity software for all common office applications, including such functions as word processing, spreadsheets, drawings, presentations, data charting and formula editing.

The project BharateeyaOO(http://www.ncb.ernet.in/bharateeyaoo) commenced on the lines of the internationalization frameworks of OpenOffice.org, to achieve Indian language support in OpenOffice.org. With initiatives for localization of OpenOffice.org in major languages of India, and support for Complex Text Layout, Indian locales, dictionary and sorting in the suite, on Windows and Linux platforms, the project aims at a Localized and Internationalized Office suite in Indian Languages that will be available free to all.

Development Efforts
As part of the project, OpenOffice.org has been built from source (tag 641) on Windows with the resource strings translated and the suite localized in Hindi, support for Indian locales and Complex Text Layout for Hindi has also been implemented. The OpenOffice.org community has granted a joint copyright to this work done at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC, formerly NCST), Electronics City, Bangalore, and a Hindi Native Language project has been setup in conjunction with this work at (http://hi.openoffice.org) to disseminate information on the project, and its developmental aspects. The following details the technical aspects of the development.

Build
OpenOffice.org contains more than 120 individual projects within it, comprising more than 9 million lines of code. For implementation of Indian language support within the suite, it was required to first build the releases from source, on both Windows and Linux platforms. This source then needed to be studied in terms of layout, platform- independent architecture and globalization support for complex text layout scripts like Indian languages, for accurate implementation of support for additional languages within the projects. Implementation changes could then be reflected by doing rebuilds of the suite, with the changed code, and subsequent testing and installation on different platforms.

Localization
Localization involved translation of the OpenOffice.org glossary having 7000 strings and resource strings, with approximately 21000 strings. Resource strings were extracted from the built source, translated in Hindi, and merged back with the localization tools. For localizing the source, the Hindi language had to be added to the build environment, build tools, resource system and installation setup projects, altogether comprising 8 independent modules of the OpenOffice.org source. Finally, this localized source, containing Hindi translations was then rebuilt to produce a Hindi localized installation, which had the entire user interface elements (menus, strings, messages, tooltips, popups, dialog boxes and so on) in Hindi.

Internationalization
Internationalization of the suite involved addition of Complex Text Layout support for word processing features in Hindi, such as typography, selection, caret movement, mouse event processing, search, complex text editing in TrueType and OpenType fonts, dialog box text processing, and multilingual text input. The work also involved addition of a Hindi locale, with currency, calendar support in Hindi, which could be dynamically set by user preference.

Currently OpenOffice.org office suite is completely localized in Hindi on the Microsoft Windows Platform. It is available for free download at http://www.ncb.ernet.in/bharateeyaoo/download/. Versions for other languages such as Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Bengali with localization and internationalization on Linux will be available soon.