[Tugindia] Some ideas for Indian TeX

[Radhakrishnan CV]

>>>>> "HSR" == H S Rai <hsraidce@iitr.ernet.in> writes:

    HSR> "Duvvuri Venu Gopal" wrote:

    Venu> · The strength of LaTeX is in its ability to simplify the
    Venu> various processes like indexing/title page making/contents
    Venu> page making/ list of tables etc. I ian languages also. TeX
    Venu> can become popular if we can write packages for these –
    Venu> like amsbook.cls we may write indicbook.cls etc.

    HSR> All state Govts has funds for promotion to local
    HSR> language. One may get his project funded by state Govt., if
    HSR> approached "properly".

I don't think funds are the sole problem of TeX or for matter free
software development in India, although I don't deny the difficulties
in getting a proposal pass through a funding agency successfully.  But
the mental resistance or rather negligence to get into the task of
developing a useful software is much more among Indian intelligentia
than in any part of the civilized world which is enormously
disproportionate to the public spending done on academia or to the
number of literate people who can do programming. Mostly, we stoop to
the level of consumers of software from the first world whether free
or non-free rather than developers, although in private and public
debates we boast about India's software writing power.

So the question is do we volunteer to do a particular task which maybe
writing code or co-ordinating a project, or documenting a software or
font development, etc. Until and unless, people volunteer to do
something useful, all these debates would lead us to something like
'arm chair revolutions' only, which is rather frustrating.

-- 
Radhakrishnan