
Janayugom, a Indian daily newspaper, has migrated completely to Free Software - ognarb
https://poddery.com/posts/4691002
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simosx
Great story with many details, including technical details.

As a summary,

* The migration involved 100 employees at 14 different offices at the state of Kerala.

* At the same time there was a migration from legacy text encodings to Unicode. They used a GUI program to convert text in legacy encoding to Unicode (language: Malayalam).

* It is a full software migration to free software, including the operating system.

* They use a Linux distribution based on Kubuntu

* The typesetting software is Scribus.

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rawoke083600
"legacy text encodings..." That sounds horrible !

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dhosek
Back in the 90s I assembled a binder of all the (not yet) legacy encodings
then in use sourcing from ECMA and elsewhere. It was four inches thick double-
sided. Unicode had just seen its initial release and it wasn't clear if that
would be the universal text encoding or if it would be ISO-10646 which
attempted to maintain a semblance of backwards compatibility with the morass
of non-Latin/extended Latin text encodings then in use. There were five
commonly used encodings covering different sets of Chinese characters alone
(Japan, Korea, mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan all had their own
encodings and selections of characters). Kids today with their UTF-8/16/32
don't know how good they have it.

~~~
zozbot234
Isn't the Unicode codepoint repertoire pretty much identical to ISO 10646?
AIUI Unicode only differs by standardizing additional character properties and
rulesets, but the encodings are supposed to be identical.

~~~
stultus
They weren't using Unicode at all. Instead they were using 'prehistoric' fonts
patched by changing the glyphs in ASCII fonts(100s of them). This too without
proper conventions. They way to convert these to Unicode is by creating
character maps in a font-by-font fashion.

~~~
yorwba
ISO 10646 does not work as you describe. I'm pretty sure most of the character
encodings defined by creating a custom font were never standardized by ISO.

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thbr99
Not surprising as the FSF India is HQed in Kerala, one of the progressive
states in India with a high HDI.

[https://www.gnu.org/press/2001-07-20-FSF-
India.html](https://www.gnu.org/press/2001-07-20-FSF-India.html)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_te...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_territories_by_Human_Development_Index)

~~~
otalp
One of the longest serving democratically elected Communist parties leading
the state as well.

~~~
kome
The Kerala model is indeed awesome, and Communist did great things there.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model)

~~~
zozbot234
"High levels of political participation and activism among ordinary people
along with substantial numbers of dedicated leaders at all levels"

It's an interesting point. Political activism has been noted before as a
plausible contributor to high social capital (especially as traditional
social-capital-providing arrangements tend to recede in modern societies),
which in turn is a significant contributor to high quality-of-life.

Of course things are not that great if that very same political activism leads
to misguided policies which keep you stuck in the middle-income trap, as we
see in so many places in South America. But it seems that a legacy of
substantial educational achievement (which is lacking elsewhere) has helped
Kerala escape that trap.

~~~
ummonk
Note that Kerala, like the rest of India, is definitely middle income. It just
has much better education rates, public health, etc, than most of India.

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yorwba
I didn't see a link to the actual newspaper in the article. I guess the layout
of their homepage isn't done in Scribus, but there's an "epaper" version that
looks like it's equivalent to the printed one:
[http://epaper.janayugomonline.com/](http://epaper.janayugomonline.com/)

~~~
tachyons
Scribus is for desktop publishing, not web pages

~~~
ognarb
In this case, the webpage contains a pictures of the printed version.

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tachyons
[https://janayugomonline.com/](https://janayugomonline.com/) I couldn't find
that image here, am I missing something ?

~~~
ranjithsiji
Janayugom Online is the webversion It is done in wordpress. you can see the
printed version in epaper.

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lordleft
As a Malayalee/Indian American, I was not familiar with Janayugom but had a
sneaking suspicion that it was a Malayalee paper — this tiny Indian state has
several newspapers with circulations that rival that of Japanese and European
papers. Awesome article.

~~~
ufo
I amazes me that even the smallest Indian states are still enormous by global
standards. Kerala's population is over 30 million!

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deanstag
For those unaware while reading the article, "mash" is a term of respect used
for teachers/professors.

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pojntfx
Scribus is amazing! I've used it for quite huge projects (like 200+ pages
magazines) and it never let me down, especially if combined with LibreOffice,
GIMP and Inkscape.

~~~
ranjithsiji
Wow that is very nice to see. I am member of dev team in Janayugom

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dilawar
My congratulations!

It's one of the few (probably only) indian states with an eye on the long term
future. Rest have given to sound bytes.

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bauripalash
It is such a great moment for India.

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xvilka
And at the same time GIMP still not migrated to GTK3...

~~~
ranjithsiji
Migration going on. Hopping a release on first quarter 2020

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hereisdx
Amazing! I hope more small scale organizations in India migrate to Free
Software and escape from the Microsoft OS Lock In.

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manojk
Congrats

