Native Feel

February 20 (LBO) – Microsoft's new Vista operating system, which comes with built in Sinhala language capability would open a high technology window for rural Sri Lankans, officials said. "The main objective of having Sinhala language in our own operating system is to enable people to interact with the computer," says Imran Vilcassim, a Microsoft technology specialist.

"What we really want to do is get them the right start give them the confidence start to use their language which they are more comfortable with."

Until the advent of the Vista operating system users had to use third party plug-ins to read Sinhala script and type.

Sri Lanka's ICT agency working with the University of Moratuwa has already developed a Unicode Sinhala font. Tamil fonts have been available for some time.

Microsoft says Sinhala script will now work smoothly in all Microsoft programs such as Excel and is not limited to Word, and they want to push the technology to rural Sri Lanka.

"Now we have the products we also have the language," Sriyan De Silva Wijeratne Country Director of Microsoft for Sri Lanka told Lanka Business Report, the weekend business news program of ETV.