The Serbian National Internet Domain Name Registry foundation (RNIDS) celebrated the twelfth anniversary of the launch of .срб domain registrations by making available, free of charge, a fifth Serbian Cyrillic typeface specially designed for screen display – Neo Geo RNIDS. In addition to the new typeface, which comprises no less than 14 fonts, additional fonts for previous typefaces that RNIDS has released were presented to mark the same occasion, and now a total of 64 fonts are available in the five font families.
The new typeface and additional fonts were presented during the Cyrillic and Technology event, where the author of the Neo Geo RNIDS typeface, Emeritus Professor Olivera Stojadinović in her talk stressed the importance of making available more extensive font families for design work where a rich choice of font weights is important for visual and artistic expression. The authors of Orto RNIDS (which now comprises 16 fonts) and Lingva RNIDS (now with 22 fonts), Ana Prodanović and Petar Vasilić, spoke about the process of creating new font weights and the additional opportunities for use that they open up. The authors noted that creating extensive font families is a serious undertaking, and noted the significance of RNIDS’ gesture of offering five typefaces to web and print content creators for them to download free of charge. During the event, new weights and fonts for Areal RNIDS were presented. All five typefaces are the result of partnership between RNIDS and the organisation Tipometar.
Neo Geo RNIDS is a geometric sans-serif typeface featuring a character width that does not change with weight. This typeface and 50 additional fonts that are part of the other typefaces are available for free download on the RNIDS website.
However fonts were not the only resources made available for free to use without restrictive licenses to mark this occasion. During the event the results of the first stage of the COMtext project were presented. COMtext is an ambitious undertaking involving the development of open resources and tools for automatic text processing in the Serbian language, with a special focus on texts from areas that are not so well-represented, such as law and administration, finance, medicine, etc. A GitHub repository with resources and tools developed for the legal and administrative domain during the first phase of the project have been published and are available to use.
Dr Vuk Batanović, of the School of Electrical Engineering Innovation Centre, spoke about the first phase of the project and the results that were achieved. Slobodan Marković (UNDP) talked with Nenad Vasiljević from law firm Karanović & Partners, Jelena Pekez, Comtrade System Integration and Dr Tanja Samardžić, University of Zurich, about how certain solutions based on artificial intelligence are already being used in legal practice, as well as the demands that the economy is already placing on companies working on the development of such solutions.
The RNIDS Foundation supported the COMtext project together with other organisations and IT companies.
Registrations in the .срб domain began on January 27, 2012. To date, almost all countries that use the Cyrillic alphabet have facilitated the registration of domain names in this script, while .срб was the second Cyrillic Internet country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) in the world.