The Indian newspaper industry faced difficulties with the transition to digital readers even before the pandemic lockdowns played havoc with circulation, advertising revenues, newsprint prices, and logistics. This encouraged publishers to increasingly look for open-source software for editorial content management systems and page layout software such as Scribus. Recently, Summit Information Technologies, an Indian publishing software company, undertook a project with the Malayala Manorama daily for the processing of its ePaper generated by Scribus open-source layout software. The project went live on 17 January 2024.
The successful integration of Summit’s editorial workflow solution Liberty with Scribus is likely to alleviate some of the software and maintenance costs of small and medium-sized news agencies and publishers.
Summit is committed to the use of computers for communication in non-Roman languages – especially Indian and Asian languages and scripts. For more than 20 years, the Gurgaon-based software company has provided tools to Indian-language newspaper publishers. These tools and solutions have grown in number and evolved into more comprehensive publishing systems or publishing workflows comprising editorial and page-making tools and allied back-office systems for advertising booking and placement.
As open-source software has become more robust, Scribus has caught the fancy of print media houses that want to take on the giants of desktop publishing software such as InDesign and QuarkXPress as much as they can. A free, open-source layout program initially used to make professional newsletters, flyers, posters, and handouts, several Indian newspapers have started using this software for the daily production of broadsheet pages. Scribus exports to PDF and many other formats and produces print-ready documents for printing either at home, in the office, in professional print shops, or the newspaper pressroom as we reported in our last issue.
Yashpal Bindra co-founder and CBO, Summit, said the Indian Newspaper industries are not yet utilizing the full potential of Scribus. This is just the beginning, he says, explaining, “The newspaper industry has still not completely recovered from the vestiges of the Covid-19 pandemic and a diligent examination of the industry reveals that growth is key to survival in the highly competitive market of today. The project with Malayala Manorama is just one step towards helping Indian newspapers quicken the editorial and production processes in real time without too much hassle. The integration of Liberty ePaper processing with Scribus will push its use as a publishing software even for those who have not yet looked at or opted for it.”
Summit’s Liberty is an editorial workflow solution comprising standard tools that have integration with Adobe, MS Word, Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and other software applications. It does not require any specific applications to integrate existing workflows – it is flexible enough to integrate any software used for typing or editing stories while enhancing the workflow in a hierarchical or managed access system.
Liberty works in both Windows and Mac environments and being a database-centric product, it can also provide templates that aid in the design of display ads, web banners, and editorial illustrations. The production team can look at the designs, content, and layout as the artwork is made –enabling it to provide changes and suggestions on the spot instead of waiting for the completed page for corrections, saving a lot of production time.
“We are now looking to make Liberty an end-to-end open-source resource,” said Bindra. “It will be a cloud-based open-source database for content management with pagination on Scribus, which reduces the need for any expensive and (SasS) subscription-based solutions. A persistent issue with regional news media and agencies is their fixation on QuarkXPress 4.0, which does not support Unicode fonts. These are computer fonts that map glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode font scheme, which is standard for language implementation worldwide and especially useful for languages and scripts that have a large number of characters and accents. Publishers get stuck with conversion problems once they need to convert the print version for digital platforms – having to first convert the non-Unicode data into Unicode. With Scribus facilitating the conversion into Unicode, it makes non-roman language and script data more portable for other digital uses easily.”
Sunil Khullar, director of technology at Summit, said that most Indian newspapers, especially the big names, have several platforms for digital and print, which they somehow integrate and convert. “Our idea is for them to not need any other conversion tool or integration software. In the digital realm, there are hundreds of open-source software, most notably the WordPress content management system. Liberty as an integration tool will provide an easy workflow by just attaching a simple plugin to WordPress that will make it a print CMS for being easily carried into InDesign or Scribus for page making.”
Khullar comments on the stagnation that has come to the Indian dailies in recent years. “Newsprint prices have risen and ad revenues have fallen drastically due to the advent of digital media and there is no right answer to be proposed for industry growth. However, sitting on your hands can never be a solution. In today’s time, AI-based computing technologies are gaining higher ground and with the ease of automation, many jobs will also be lost – much like how Grammarly and other editing tools have made the proofreading departments in newspapers redundant. During the pandemic, many small and medium publishers focused heavily on cost-cutting as they were unable to afford several resources. Workflow and pagination have surely come to be seen as a potential area to reduce human resources and software licenses.”
Bindra adds that other ongoing developments will enable the auto-push of printed content from whichever CMS an agency operates to their web platforms without any conversion or layout issues. “If we talk about regional dailies or hyperlocal news we can assume that there are approximately a thousand articles floating from each city. Editorial and production activities need time to process through every little detail for both print and digital so this development to auto-publish content is bound to save a lot of time.”
In addition, one must consider that the considerable interest in AI is bound to lead to it being a key component in all cloud computing processes. “Going onward, I think open-source software will be taken more seriously with AI at the helm. It may gradually become paid like there is a premium version for ChatGPT but for the time being, Scribus will be the most apt solution for cutting cost and saving time in pagemaking and layout software,” Bindra concludes.
