Story of Janayugom (Daily newspaper from South India) Migrated to Scribus

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ranjithsiji

Janayugom is a Malayalam (a South-Indian language spoken in Kerala) daily newspaper with nearly 100,000 subscribers and 14 bureaus in Kerala, South-India, India. Now Janayugom is using Scribus 1.5.6 for their daily production of the news paper from October 2, 2019. Janayugom uses a modified version of Kubuntu for nearly 100 computers. The complete environment is running of GNU/Linux for past 3 months.

Alphafork technologies
with KH Hussain and PK Ashok Kumar done the migration of the newspaper to a scribus based workflow.

We studied the workflow of Janayugom prepress processes and decided to develop an operating system, also known as GNU/Linux distribution (distro as short), that satisfies all their needs. We chose Kubuntu (a flavor of Ubuntu that comes with KDE Desktop Environment by default instead of GNOME) as the base distro for developing the OS because Ubuntu (a derivative of Debian GNU/Linux, a community project which also maintains the largest repo of Free Software in the world) has better support for a wide variety of hardware in general and offers relatively latest updates (w.r.t 'Debian stable' because it's based on 'Debian testing') without making much compromise in stability. Also, KDE was getting more leaner (with considerable decrease in memory consumption) and faster recently and at the same time makes it easier for users to migrate from Windows due to its similar look and feel.

Under the strong leadership of Rajaji Mathew Thomas (Janayugom Editor) and the management of Janayugom, all staffs got prepared to adapt themselves with the migration of entire software stack they were using for a long time. It has its difficulties to prepare the entire staff for a whole technology stack migration since they have to learn many new things and eventually have to forget what they got used to do for the past two decades. But the confidence and determination of Hussain mash and Ashokan mash helped Rajaji and the management team to go ahead with courage.

Janayugom consists of more than 100 employees and nearly the same number of computers spread across 14 bureaus all over Kerala. For the migration to be seamless it was decided to conduct hands-on training for all the corresponding employees in three batches, each consisting of 5-days training. One day to learn the basic usage of operating system and to get started with understanding the whole software stack and the workflow, one day for graphics related training including GIMP and Inkscape and three days dedicated for Scribus training.

According to what we know, Janayugom publications are the pioneers in the world in successfully implementing 100% Free Software for all the prepress processes in news publishing. We were very glad to help them in fulfilling this historical achievement.

I think this is a greatest success story of usage of Scribus.

You can read the full story at https://alphafork.com/janayugom.html

KDE officially tweeted our success story and the story was trending on Hackernews.

Hope this story inspires more people to migrate to scribus.

Ranjith Siji, founder, Alphafork Technologies.
Implementing Scribus in Newspaper Workflow.

fox72

Hello Ranjith Siji!
I am interested to know how scribus is used in your newspaper:

  • All newspaper issues does one group of employees?
  • How many employees of the group work in Scribus?
  • How are spelling errors corrected - in a layout or word processor?
  • How do you create tables in Scribus that contain many rows and columns and do not fit on the same page?
  • What are the color management settings and icc profile?
  • How does the layout transfer to the printing house? Are there any problems with this?
I hope your experience will inspire many people to use Scribus and wish you good luck!

ranjithsiji

    All newspaper issues does one group of employees?
Nope. They have 3 different layout units at 3 different places.
    How many employees of the group work in Scribus?
75-100 almost.
    How are spelling errors corrected - in a layout or word processor?
The proof reading team is doing this work
    How do you create tables in Scribus that contain many rows and columns and do not fit on the same page?
Using guides and tabs and they draw lines for that.
    What are the color management settings and icc profile?
I really don't know. but they are using the default one.
    How does the layout transfer to the printing house? Are there any problems with this?
PDF - There was a lot of problems in the press. But we managed to solve all. They are creating a pdf of each page and send all the pages to press. At the press there is a software with seperates cmyk into 4 plates.
Implementing Scribus in Newspaper Workflow.