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 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)
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.
Other than high literacy (which means able to sign your own name), I don't understand why Kerala is considered as good exmaple?
1. Due to communist style of functioning, setting up a business is near impossibility. I know friends who moved their business out of state since its marred with strikes.
3. Infrastructure seems to be dated (single lane road for most part of state) and floods wreak havoc every year.
Tagged as "God's own country" I expect much better from Kerala. However, I always find cliched "most educated" state remarks and self-pat on back without perusing its problems and what is happening to state.
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/
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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)
https://www.gnu.org/press/2001-07-20-FSF-India.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_te...
1. Due to communist style of functioning, setting up a business is near impossibility. I know friends who moved their business out of state since its marred with strikes.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/18-days-after-nri-...
2. It is fast becoming Islamic state of India.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/isis-recruiter...
https://m.economictimes.com/news/defence/kerala-coast-on-ale...
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/nia-conducts-raid-in-t...
3. Infrastructure seems to be dated (single lane road for most part of state) and floods wreak havoc every year.
Tagged as "God's own country" I expect much better from Kerala. However, I always find cliched "most educated" state remarks and self-pat on back without perusing its problems and what is happening to state.
Deleted Comment
It's one of the few (probably only) indian states with an eye on the long term future. Rest have given to sound bytes.