Language Support of Office Suites
One of the distinct advantages of free software is the diversity of the community, which often translates in a wider language support. This is the case of LibreOffice, which is able to support a larger number of languages than Microsoft Office (and of other open source office suites).
The table is based on information available online, about available language packs for LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, Apache OpenOffice and Calligra (which users can download to have at least the User Interface in their native language).
Numbers are native language speakers, according to the last version of Ethnologue (which is considered a reference from Wikipedia, and other sources as well).
If you find a mistake, please leave a comment and I will update the document as soon as possible. Any other comment to this post will be deleted.
The table is really great. LibreOffice is really leading. Including language variants (e.g. Australian English, Brazilian Portuguese…) there are localizations available in 113 languages.
However, it is getting more confuse if you look at the details of the language support. Is a language supported with (1) localized user interface, (2) AutoText, (3) AutoCorrect, (4) Spell check, (5) Hyphenation, (6) Grammar check, and (7) Thesaurus. I think in your article, you are just referring to the localized UI, do you?
This wiki page tries to capture all that information, but it is not yet complete:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Language_support_of_LibreOffice
(to everyone: please feel free to update the language information on the wiki page)
Yes, the table is about available language packs, which is some cases include only the localized UI.
Another remark, you’re speaking about native speakers.
In the example of occitan, it’s mostly used in south france and spain, but not as native language.
http://www.ethnologue.com/language/oci indicate a language status as 4 (educationnal). Having a look at http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/status does indicate that any language have to be considered to cover 100% of the population.
But it’s not that simple, and i’m myself confused.
A more accurate comparison with Apache OpenOffice would have readers look at
(1) https://translations.documentfoundation.org/projects/libo_ui/
and
(2) https://translate.apache.org/projects/aoo40/
The Apache OpenOffice project only release language packs when (a) the language UI is fully translated and (b) the next release.
Clearly users are free to choose which ever Office they wish.
Although the comparison was between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, I have updated the table to reflect the situation at AOO provided by that project.
I have updated the wiki page on “Language support of LibreOffice” (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Language_support_of_LibreOffice) according to the table in this blog. It is now complete regarding the localized UI.
If anyone has more information on spell checking dictionaries, hyphenation, and other language support, please update the information in the wiki page. Thanks!
I think you forgot Luxembourgish in your list.