Hi all, As reported by KG Kumar of TugIndia. For the complete story visit http://lwn.net/Articles/25694/
Goes to show that TeX is more than an academic interest! ;-) --indra. The latest edition of BSNL's telephone directory for Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, was processed and typeset with a range of free software tools that gave substantial savings on costs and time, and allowed BSNL to produce a neatly laid out and elegant publication ahead of schedule. The two-volume directory, to be distributed to all subscribers of the Thiruvananthapuram Secondary Switching Area (SSA) from March 25, has 1,200 pages and 320,000 entries. At present, 400,000 copies of the directory are being printed by the city-based St. Joseph's Press (SJP), using typesetting software and programs provided by River Valley Technologies (RVT) (www.river-valley.com), a Thiruvananthapuram-based software house that has vast expertise in offering typesetting and publishing solutions using free and open-source software. According to K. Sreekantan Nair, Principal General Manager of the Thiruvananthapuram telecom district, BSNL has spent Rs 35 million (approrimately US$ 700,000) on printing the directory. For SJP, this was a particularly prestigious order since it is the single largest printing job to be ever undertaken in Kerala. In the normal course, an order of this magnitude -- a print run of 400,000 copies, each of 1,200 pages on 48 GSM white paper in three columns of Helvetica Narrow 7 point typeface, with 94 lines per column -- would have taken six months and involved around 50 employees wholly dedicated to the work. However, in this case, SJP was able to beat the March 15 deadline set by BSNL and, according to Fr. Thekkel, will be able to finish the entire printing in four months, using a small team. The secret to the swift processing of the job was in the typesetting work done by RVT. "Had we used the normal programs like PageMaker or QuarkXPress, we would have needed three months time," says Fr. Thekkel. RVT, on the other hand, used a combination of free software programs to extract BSNL's data, process it and typeset it into camera-ready copy. According to C. V. Radhakrishnan, Managing Director of RVT, the BSNL data of telephone numbers, subscribers names and addresses was supplied as files in dBase, an outdated database software that goes back to the days of the DOS operating system. Using a set of free software libraries downloaded from the Internet and locally customised, this data was extracted into the postgreSQL relational database, also free software, and then entirely recreated. RVT then wrote a Java program to pipe this newly generated database into TeX, a powerful typesetting engine and programming language, written by Donald Knuth of Stanford University and releasedin the public domain. From TeX, RVT produced the final output as Portable Document Format (PDF) files, using pdfTeX, also free software. "So powerful is TeX that it was able to process nearly 1,200 pages in just four minutes," says Radhakrishnan, who is also the founding member of the Indian TeX users Group (www.tug.org.in). "Not only that, since it is also a programming language, it is able to do several things automatically, like the generation of header markers, for example," he adds. -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
