7 ms·

Janayugom, a Indian daily newspaper, has migrated completely to Free Software

305 points by ognarb 7y ago

simosx 7y ago
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.
- darkwater 7y ago
  Other free software used include LibreOffice, GIMP and Inkscape
- rawoke083600 7y ago
  "legacy text encodings..." That sounds horrible !
  - katet 7y ago
    They are particularly horrendous..I've had the misfortune to work with government-provided PDFs using custom font glyphs in lieu of proper encodings. In some cases this was the only way to encode particular languages/scripts before Unicode (Jawi was my personal experience). There are now better ways, but poorly-exposed operating system support means most people with these needs still have custom fonts as the entrenched method of text entry. Some of the encodings were so esoteric we resorted to OCR instead to extract the embedded text. It was quite frustrating to know that somebody - somewhere - knew what each octet represented, but it wasn't remotely Google-able (in English, at any rate). (Tamil was also problematic, and still is, even with Unicode, as I understand it)
  - dhosek 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        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.
    - aitchnyu 7y ago
      Back in the 90s, the leading Malayalam newspaper had us download an exe of a font installer, maybe only for IE5.
deanstag 7y ago
For those unaware while reading the article, "mash" is a term of respect used for teachers/professors.
bauripalash 7y ago
It is such a great moment for India.
dilawar 7y ago
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.
manojk 7y ago
Congrats
lordleft 7y ago
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 7y ago
  I amazes me that even the smallest Indian states are still enormous by global standards. Kerala's population is over 30 million!
thbr99 7y ago
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_territories_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_te...
- otalp 7y ago
  One of the longest serving democratically elected Communist parties leading the state as well.
  - kome 7y ago
    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
    - vijaybritto 7y ago
      Very true. Most developed state in India
      - thbr99 7y ago
        Worlds first solar powered airport too. https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/14/technology/india-cochin-solar-powered-airport/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/14/technology/india-cochin-sol...
    - jeswin 7y ago
      I grew up in Kerala in the 80s. When I go back I feel like we have walked backwards in many areas - religious conservatism and fundamentalism are out in the open. The internet had a huge role to play in that. Still better than many other states, but certainly not what it could have been. There are certainly many good things the Communists did, but it has also been the most violent (by democratic standards, not on a North Korea scale). Now, that isn't surprising because that's been the case with communism throughout history. Back then Stalin posters were everywhere, and most of us were only exposed to one side of such people.
yorwba 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Scribus is for desktop publishing, not web pages
  - ognarb 7y ago
    In this case, the webpage contains a pictures of the printed version.
    - tachyons 7y ago
      https://janayugomonline.com/ https://janayugomonline.com/ I couldn't find that image here, am I missing something ?
      - tachyons 7y ago
        Nvm, got it
      - ranjithsiji 7y ago
        Janayugom Online is the webversion It is done in wordpress. you can see the printed version in epaper.
pojntfx 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Wow that is very nice to see. I am member of dev team in Janayugom
hereisdx 7y ago
Amazing! I hope more small scale organizations in India migrate to Free Software and escape from the Microsoft OS Lock In.
xvilka 7y ago
And at the same time GIMP still not migrated to GTK3...
- ranjithsiji 7y ago
  Migration going on. Hopping a release on first quarter 2020

305 points by ognarb 7y ago

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.

darkwater 7y ago
Other free software used include LibreOffice, GIMP and Inkscape
rawoke083600 7y ago
"legacy text encodings..." That sounds horrible !
- katet 7y ago
  They are particularly horrendous..I've had the misfortune to work with government-provided PDFs using custom font glyphs in lieu of proper encodings. In some cases this was the only way to encode particular languages/scripts before Unicode (Jawi was my personal experience). There are now better ways, but poorly-exposed operating system support means most people with these needs still have custom fonts as the entrenched method of text entry. Some of the encodings were so esoteric we resorted to OCR instead to extract the embedded text. It was quite frustrating to know that somebody - somewhere - knew what each octet represented, but it wasn't remotely Google-able (in English, at any rate). (Tamil was also problematic, and still is, even with Unicode, as I understand it)
- dhosek 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
  - aitchnyu 7y ago
    Back in the 90s, the leading Malayalam newspaper had us download an exe of a font installer, maybe only for IE5.

deanstag 7y ago

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

bauripalash 7y ago

It is such a great moment for India.

dilawar 7y ago

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.

manojk 7y ago

Congrats

lordleft 7y ago

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 7y ago
I amazes me that even the smallest Indian states are still enormous by global standards. Kerala's population is over 30 million!

thbr99 7y ago

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_territories_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_te...

otalp 7y ago
One of the longest serving democratically elected Communist parties leading the state as well.
- kome 7y ago
  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
  - vijaybritto 7y ago
    Very true. Most developed state in India
    - thbr99 7y ago
      Worlds first solar powered airport too. https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/14/technology/india-cochin-solar-powered-airport/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/14/technology/india-cochin-sol...
  - jeswin 7y ago
    I grew up in Kerala in the 80s. When I go back I feel like we have walked backwards in many areas - religious conservatism and fundamentalism are out in the open. The internet had a huge role to play in that. Still better than many other states, but certainly not what it could have been. There are certainly many good things the Communists did, but it has also been the most violent (by democratic standards, not on a North Korea scale). Now, that isn't surprising because that's been the case with communism throughout history. Back then Stalin posters were everywhere, and most of us were only exposed to one side of such people.

yorwba 7y ago

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 7y ago
Scribus is for desktop publishing, not web pages
- ognarb 7y ago
  In this case, the webpage contains a pictures of the printed version.
  - tachyons 7y ago
    https://janayugomonline.com/ https://janayugomonline.com/ I couldn't find that image here, am I missing something ?
    - tachyons 7y ago
      Nvm, got it
    - ranjithsiji 7y ago
      Janayugom Online is the webversion It is done in wordpress. you can see the printed version in epaper.

pojntfx 7y ago

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 7y ago
Wow that is very nice to see. I am member of dev team in Janayugom

hereisdx 7y ago

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

xvilka 7y ago

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

ranjithsiji 7y ago
Migration going on. Hopping a release on first quarter 2020