The Hungarian government has committed to invest just over a million pounds (370 million HUF) in the development of applications that use the open document format (ODF), according to a report on the European Union's Joinup web site. Two organisations will benefit from the funding: the Department of Software Engineering at the University of Szeged and the open source development company, Multiráció. In December of last year, the Hungarian government announced that from April 2012 all official documents would need to be prepared in internationally recognised open-standards-based formats.

Multiráció is the developer of the open office suite, EuroOffice, originally based on OpenOffice.org. The company will now build a version of EuroOffice for tablets and will also work on improving the collaborative functions within EuroOffice. According to Kázmér Koleszár, a software developer at Multiráció: "The University of Szeged will do the quality assurance and usability related research and tool development. Multiráció will develop the office application and work on several extensions." The university will be developing tools to improve the quality of the source code and the usability of the program's user interface.

(ehe)