 Hi everyone, my name is Ambadi and I am here to talk about pre-software, first-field and KDE. First I will introduce myself, I am basically working as a full-stack web developer and I am also a programmer. I work at a company called AlphaFox Technologies, located in a small state of Kerala in India. I am also a member of pre-software community of India. You can come there as a CI to PrimaSoft in France. We provide privacy respecting services, we promote pre-software in India, coordinating various pre-software communities and all. So the main topic of my topic is about a newspaper in Kerala, it's called Janiyugam. We speak a language called Manayalam in the state of Kerala. It's Janiyugam paper, it's owned by the CPI Kerala State Committee political party. It has almost about 100K readers and it is founded in 1947. So talking about the background of the story, it started with the Janiyugam paper's decision to migrate to a new re-advanced technology stack. The main reason was this is because of their increasing cost of proprietary software. They were unable to continue their work. So they were looking for alternative solutions. There are also other reasons such as the friendly government policies. It was interrupting their industry. As you can see in 2019, reporters without borders has ranked India 140 out of 180 countries in the press freedom index. Actually it's very pathetic situation. New paper and other media trying hard to survive. So the first decision of Janiyugam was to switch to Adobe InDesign. They already used Adobe PageMaker before. But as I said, the increasing cost prevented them. So looking for alternatives. They ended up with a pre-software artist called Praveena Dimbrathuri who suggested them to use Krivaz. And that's how they came to meet us. As you can see in the photo, this is the Janiyugam pre-software project migration team. This is the old software stack they used. It consisted of Microsoft Windows. And ask it to Unicode converter tool called TypeIt which only works on Windows. They also have other adopt tools such as PageMaker and Photoshop. So what we suggested them is to use pre-software instead. Of course including Krivaz. Instead of just switching only the type setting software, we also suggested them to change their stack including operating system. And the primary choice was KD based Kubuntu or Kubuntu. We suggested that we could develop a custom distro for them based on this Kubuntu. We chose Kubuntu 19.04 consisting of Plasma desktop, Krivaz. And we added a software called Janiyugam edit. Previously I mentioned TypeIt, right? So as an alternative for it to work in Linux, we developed our own from scratch. Ask it to Unicode converter. And it's called Janiyugam edit. And we also added Dim and Escape to the stack. And these are the other softwares. It includes Kate, Oculaard, Firefox, LibreOffice, PlayingShotKrilla. Actually they were very happy with the new software stack if they have introduced two. So let me get a little bit back to the story. This is K.H. Hussain from Kerala. He used to design various custom Unicode fonts. So in this project, his role was to design three different Unicode fonts for Janiyugam. Till then they only used the task key, which was in, you know, RobepageMaker, which did in support Unicode. This K.H. Hussain, we call him Hussain master along with Hussain master. It was them who conducted us regarding this migration project. As the Adobe design wasn't affordable, they consulted Hussain master first. And Ashok Kumar, he's also from Kerala who has more than four decades of expertise in that type setting. So they came to know about scribes from Praveen and they contacted us. Like I said before, we suggested them scribes and a Kubuntu-based software stack. Our team also consisted of these members as you can see in the picture right now. Talking from left most, it is Kanan. Right next to him with the one bag is called Chernya. And the one behind her is Ranjit Siji. And next to him is Ashok and master. And the one in the center with White Chat is Rajaji Mathew. And we have Mujib, me and Hussain master in the photo. This is the core team who worked behind this migration project. Kanan, Ranjit Siji, Mujib and everybody, we worked together in Alpha 4 Technologies. As I said, the migration also included migration from Maharshi to Unicode as well. Three different fonts were developed called T-Enjoy, Arsugudan, which consists of exclusive character set in Malayalam, in ASCII, which didn't have that option. Coming to the voice part, why we choose KDE? The main reason is to be frank, it's a familiar UI. Windows people really find it easy to use KDE. It's very user friendly and it also provides a lot of customization features. And Scriber is the main software, they use for type setting. It is in Qt and KDE integrates well with Qt. The custom ASCII to Unicode software we developed, it also works in Qt. And KDE provides Plasma widgets, which is another cool feature. So what we customized a lot is regarding around the Plasma theme. We customized it to make it unique to give the branding for Genevigam. The boot animation from boot animation to wallpaper and their theme, we changed it a lot to match the branding of Genevigam. They were very happy with it. The Plasma, Splash Cream, SDDM login theme, icon theme, custom menu icon theme. We almost redesigned their look and feel to make it look more unique to them. And one of the cool features they like most is Dolphin features. As you know, it was entirely new to them to experience the tabbed browsing in a file manager. On one side, we showed a demo with Firefox and they compared it to Dolphin, sharing the tabbed browsing feature and all. The same shortcuts, you know, Control-T to open a new tab, Control-W to close it, Control-Shift-T opens a recently closed tab. They were very happy with it. And the split view was really helpful to them. You know, working with the two different directories at a time, switching is very easy with the split view. The file preview, even text files can be previewed. They work with text files most, so, you know, the content for newspaper, it is easy to preview before opening a text file. And a couple of additional features we added is service menus. For example, two Editing majors and PDF files. We added access service menus to make it very easy for them. And network options with the Dolphin to access remote files, that is also very handy. This is a public announcement photo. Before explaining about that, let me say a little more about the background story of Scribus. Many of you may have been already familiar with it. Scribus is a cross-platform pre-and-open source software for desktop publishing. Usually, I mean, before some time, it didn't support many languages such as Malayalam used here. There was a project called Hosterman, headed by Fahad El Seibi, who introduced non-Latin language support with a complex test layout in Scribus. That really helped us a lot because only after that we were able to use Malayalam in Scribus. Without that, this whole project would have been even possible. So I would like to thank Mr. Fahad El Seibi and their Hosterman team for their valuable contribution to Scribus. Actually, that is the beauty of pre-software. People can add features missing. The project took almost one month to complete the training session for about 100 staff. It was a hands-on session. We took it in three batches. Everyone went fine because they were already familiar with the desktop publishing system, so it was very hard to train them. The only issue is the changing look and feel. But as I said, the KDE made the transition very easy. Apart from just giving training regarding the software stack, we also introduced the philosophy of pre-software. We even recommended to upload the images and contribute to Wikipedia, and staff were very friendly and they cooperated with us. They were very enthusiastic about learning all this. We talked about Creative Commons license and all. We also gave them training in basic, you know, the straw, how to interact with the desktop environment and the escape. There were some couple of issues regarding hardware and all because we don't have free software drivers for all hardware and all, so we had some issues. Some of them we solved by checking many online forums and all, but some we couldn't fix and we suggested them to buy new software. After everyone got trained in using Scribus, we went for a pilot period of one month where they slowly transitioned page by page each week. So it was actually a combination of Scribus and Adobe for some time. Once they were confident enough to switch completely to Scribus, we ran for another week. It is on November 1st, the official announcement was done and it was by Chief Minister of Kerala, Mr. Pinarayi Vijayan, as you can see in the photo. He announced the migration to free software stack and Unicode event. We didn't support using proprietary platforms, whether it is social media or even for personal usage. So what we did instead for promoting the event was to share the post across free software based social media platforms such as diaspora and master.on. We didn't even have a Twitter account. Actually it is the diaspora post that you can see here and we also shared the content in master.on. From master.on, the post really picked up. I got many shares and even KDE officially shared it. We were very happy with it. That's how we got real exposure. We got also featured on hacker news and what made me happy more is the episode officially shared the story. This is the Geneva staff after the first training batch. After the training session and all, there are also a submit, submitting many people from different industries, from the press industry mainly. To discuss about the future of this project, many were very interested. Even Kerala government offered support to continue with this project. It is a Kerala media academy who organized the two-day submit. The submit was inaugurated by Fahad El Saidi who was the leader of Fosterman project. One of the core developers of Fosterman project who contributed to Scribus. Everyone offered all support needed for the development in Scribus and this project. There was also another Scribus developer who I should mention here. His name is Halery Moldy. One experience I would like to share is as soon as we filed a bug report, we got a patch to fix it overnight. We were able to fix the bug. The submit also became the venue for the formation of a consortium with the above mentioned representatives and IT experts to promote self-reliance in publishing. The consortium also promised to respond for further developments. We really wish we can implement this in various other newspapers so that free software, we can expect many free software based newspapers. That's the story of Jenny Udom. We hope this inspires many newspapers to come forward to switch to free software and we will be always happy to help. The one receiving the presentation in this photo, this is Mr. Fahad El Saidi. I hope my time is over. The remaining session is left for question and answer. Hi, I am Baji. That was a great inspiring talk. I would really like to mention this to the audience that he was so not well but he still gave us a great talk, so applause for that. Great work. We have few questions which I will be reading out. The first question is the talk seems to be focusing more on DTP aspects. Do you have online service integration such as Google AMP or news aggregator services? Sorry, currently there is no online integration but we are also working on a project called new flow management software. It will have this cloud integration feature and all but we are not planning to integrate Google AMP. We would like to keep it free software only. Another question, would you mind sharing the action scripts? They could be handy even for blogging. Actually, we haven't developed any action scripts yet. We have even shared the full software. As I said, the desktop was based on Kubuntu but we haven't shared the actual code to build the distro instead. We shared whatever we customized in a report so that one can follow it and customize it as they like because even if you share, it contains the branding of generom and all. There is no issue with sharing. The only issue is you will have to remove branding from it. We just shared the tutorial to build the custom distro as they like. With all the customizations we have made, it is documented. It is available in Githra.githlab instance hosted by free software community of India. Back to the question, sorry that we don't have any action scripts to share now. The last question, any hard challenges you face during this project? Yes, actually the first challenge was to make the staff confident that they can switch to a new software stack because everyone was familiar with the software which they have been using for almost 10 to 15 years. It is really hard for them to switch to a new software stack one day. So preparing the staff to work with the new software stack was the main challenge. After we were able to show them, they were really started to gain confidence. It was relatively easy for them to migrate and some other challenges we faced was regarding hardware support. Many hardware doesn't support free software drivers and all. So some thing they gave us some issues. Apart from that, everything went fine. And there is also issue with, you know, Scribus is not yet fully whenever we can compare it with Adobe in design. It still needs a lot of development and we are working on that. We have a metrics room with Scribus developers. We are discussing the changes we need and they are very friendly and I hope it will become an advanced tool soon. We hope the same too. Thank you so much, Ambadi. Thank you for the great talk. Thanks a lot.