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

305 points| ognarb | 6 years ago |poddery.com | reply

39 comments

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[+] simosx|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
Other free software used include LibreOffice, GIMP and Inkscape
[+] rawoke083600|6 years ago|reply
"legacy text encodings..." That sounds horrible !
[+] yorwba|6 years ago|reply
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/
[+] tachyons|6 years ago|reply
Scribus is for desktop publishing, not web pages
[+] lordleft|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
I amazes me that even the smallest Indian states are still enormous by global standards. Kerala's population is over 30 million!
[+] deanstag|6 years ago|reply
For those unaware while reading the article, "mash" is a term of respect used for teachers/professors.
[+] pojntfx|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
Wow that is very nice to see. I am member of dev team in Janayugom
[+] dilawar|6 years ago|reply
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.

[+] xvilka|6 years ago|reply
And at the same time GIMP still not migrated to GTK3...
[+] ranjithsiji|6 years ago|reply
Migration going on. Hopping a release on first quarter 2020
[+] hereisdx|6 years ago|reply
Amazing! I hope more small scale organizations in India migrate to Free Software and escape from the Microsoft OS Lock In.