[Tugindia] TUGDelhi Meet report

[amitabhtrehan at softhome.net]

Report Meeting of TUGDelhi 11th July 2004 

Amitabh Trehaan secretary, TUGDelhi 

July 21, 2004 

The third meeting of TUGDelhi was held at Sarai/CSDS, Rajpur Road on11th 
July 2004. The meeting was scheduled from 10:30 AM to 2 PM but ran from 
10:45 to 3 PM. 16 people attended, of which, 14 were attending for the first 
time. I, Ravikant, Mary and Abhinav represented Sarai. S. Venkat came all 
the way from IGNOU. There was the enthusiastic team (cricket team of 
11members?) from ICCorp led by Trilok Chand and Sandeep Mittal, most of them 
coming from far off places, and there was Ganesh Sharma from Delhi 
University.I made a general presentation on various aspects of LaTeX and TeX 
primarily as an introduction to beginners. It was useful to bring to the 
notice of the members the organisational support available for TeX work in 
the form of TUG association and the Web based archives of TeX, and the 
commercial value and utilisation of TeX. TeX originated more than a quarter 
century ago as an initiative of Donald Knuth who did not find a suitable 
typesetting sys-system for his Algorithms books. The TeX Users Group is a 
body almost as old which celebrated its silver jubilee last year by holding 
its annual meet at Big Island, Hawaii. The biggest strength of TeX is in 
Scientific and mathematical typesetting especially for journals and Books. 
However, recent TeX offshoots like ConTeXt are taking TeX into stylistic 
typesetting with powerful colour, graphics and special effects(?) support.An 
aspect of TeX very important in the present scenario is that it is a free 
software (i.e. the source code is readily available). Thus, it is a 
predecessor to the present revolution of free software. A focus area for 
TUGIndia has been utilisation of TeX for Indian language and multilingual 
typesetting. A lot of advancement has been made in this area in the recent 
time but a lot needs to be done (including educating end users) before TeX 
can revitalise the In-dian publishing scene and help it emerge from its 
mediocrity. In this context, development efforts have been made by TUGIndia 
members and the devnag development team (devnag is the primary LaTeX package 
for devanagari script typesetting), Dr. Wagish Shukla (who published a whole 
book in devnag and LaTeX) and Sarai (where attempt is being made to make 
simpler visual aids to TeX e.g. by adding Indian language support to the LyX 
GUI for TeX). I distributed CDs of the distribution `Sarai/TUGDelhi TeXLive 
2004' which I developed at Sarai. This distribution is simply the latest 
TeXLive CD (Linux installable, no more Live actually) with updated devnag 
package support. 

This was a rather longish discussion and presentation, hence, a `Break' was 
invoked. TUGDelhi had nice cups of tea at the beautiful in-house cafe at 
Sarai.Later, Samosas and Chips were also consumed during the meeting. 

After the break, a very interesting talk (at least for industry outsiders) 
was made by Trilok and Sandeep on LATEX production workflow. It gave a 
direct insight into the compositors work, functioning of the business and 
the technical aspects involved. A striking aspect was the degree of 
professionalism involved in the whole process, especially where foreign 
clients are involved. The Publisher, Compositor and the Printer are well 
defined entities. The Publisher interacts with the author and the 
compositor. The compositor bids for composition and typesetting work. On a 
successful bid, a strict contract is signed which is very detailed and 
stipulates the software, Operating Systems etc. the compositor has to use 
for the job. The compositor has to interact at his end with the printer who 
will give the final printed and bound text. The Onus of composition and 
printing is strictly with the compositor who has to pay heavy damages in 
case of any mistakes. Ravikant compared this to the situation he faces when 
he has to get his magazine published where they do the composition in-house 
and then run after the publisher and printers. The main USP of publishers in 
this scenario is their distribution network.Trilok and Sandeep divided the 
workflow into the following stages: 

1. Getting material from customer (via the publisher) as CE MSS with design 
specs/layout, electronic files and fonts. 

2. Evaluating the material received and bidding for the work. At this stage 
text extraction is done from the electronic files (this is not required for 
TeX files since these are plain text) using 3rd party extraction software. 

3. Setting up the job by creating style files, font matrics (for Macintosh) 
and getting sample pages approved from the customer (read, the publisher). 

4. TEX, LATEX coding as per the layout. 

5. Creation of pages. Pages created using Texture 2.1/MAC , and multiple 
rounds of proof-reading is done, Quality Control is invoked and pages sent 
to the customer. 

6. Multiple master rounds (called M1, M2...) may be done depending on text 
complexity. 

7. Final pages are sent to the author after all the corrections are done. 8. 
Printer - all done, the files are sent to the printer for the print run. 9. 
Archiving. within a week of the print run, the author receives the archive 
of the publication. 

In Trilok's division which mainly deals with format conversions (TeX to 
XML/MathMl, for example), he estimates that around 40% work happens on LATEX 
, whereas since Sandeep's division deals primarily with LATEX work, most of 
their work is on LATEX. 

After this, it was time for some core technical stuff, so Venkat took the 
stage. He made a presentation on how to install Omega. This includes setting 
up the local texmf tree and then making the correct directories so as to 
install devnag in it. Then, the system can be extended to include files of 
Omega which give devanagari support, including OTP (Omega Translation 
Process) files etc.There are some small changes to the source file of the 
regular devnag LATEX file for use with Lambda. In case, Omega and Lambda are 
confusing you - Omegas the Unicode equivalent of TEX and Lambda is akin to 
LATEX. This procedure has also been elaborated by Venkat in an article he 
had published some time back. 

The last talk of the day was given by Ravikant who highlighted the end users 
requirements especially in the context of Indian language publishing. He 
pointed out the need for systems conforming to a system like Unicode and the 
need for better lingual support for the end user especially at the interface 
level. 

At the business end of the meeting, a few important proposals were 
discussed. A dire need for training programs and education on LATEX was 
expressed. It was pointed out that the industry is suffering due to a lack 
of trained manpower especially due the lack of skilled people with formal 
TEX training (who can say, develop sophisticated style sheets directly from 
specifications). 

It was suggested that there are two levels where courses would be very 
beneficial. The first level is at the primary beginner level where people 
who have no exposure to LATEX e..g. college students attend workshops (say 
1-day training workshops) at nominal fees (it was unanimously agreed that 
workshops should not be free of cost). It was agreed that TUGDelhi has 
in-house expertise for this kind of workshop. The second level of workshops 
will be the workshops for people already using TEX and who need to formalise 
their notions of typesetting and learn more complex concepts which would 
enable them to do things like designing new styles etc. from scratch. The 
urgency of this kind of workshop was emphasised. There is a whole body of 
TEX professionals in Delhi who do not have a formal training in typesetting 
concepts and who would be very happy to take such courses. These programs 
would carry a higher fees and outside experts (say, from Trivandrum and 
Bangalore) may also be required here. Trilok Chand volunteered to chalk out 
an action plan for these workshops and post it to the mailing list when 
ready. It was proposed that the next meeting be held on 1st August, which is 
a Sunday. This and other details would be finalised after discussion on the 
mailing list.
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Amitabh