Free software makes life easier for telephone users

Using free software and open-source alternatives, the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited was able to bring out the telephone directory in Thiruvananthapuram in record time and at reduced costs. FREDERICK NORONHA describes how all this was achieved and makes his case for the use of free software rather than proprietary alternatives

One-third of a million telephone users, deep down in south India, won’t find locating phone numbers such a complex maze any more, thanks in a significant way to free software.

Telephone directories often take notoriously long to get published in India, meaning that phone subscribers are lost while trying to find out the numbers they so badly need in order to call someone.

In the past few weeks, the latest edition of the telephone directory of Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram was processed and typeset with a range of free software tools. These lent substantial savings on costs and time, while bringing out a neatly laid-out and elegant publication ahead of schedule. The two-volume directory, recently distributed to all subscribers of the Thiruvananthapuram secondary switching area, has 1,200 pages and around 3,20,000 entries.

Some 4,00,000 copies of the directory were printed by the locally-based St. Joseph’s Press (SJP), using typesetting software and programs provided by River Valley Technologies (RVT), also based in the Kerala capital and specialising in typesetting and publishing solutions using free and open-source software. (Free, open-source software is software whose source code is freely available for scrutiny, modification or distribution, unlike proprietary software, which is privately owned and closely held.)

For the phone directory publishers—domestic telecom giant Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL)—this is the first complete directory to be published since 1999. K Sreekantan Nair, principal general manager of the Thiruvananthapuram telecom district, said BSNL has spent Rs 3.5 crore on printing the directory.

In the normal course, an order of this magnitude—a print run of 4,00,000 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.

Crunch time

However, in this case, the press was able to finish the entire printing in four months, using a small team. At present, SJP’s printing presses are operating 21 hours per day at their maximum capacity of 20,000 copies per hour to finish the directory printing.

Using proprietary page-making software could have taken a longer time, said RVT. The company instead used a combination of free software programs to extract BSNL’s data, process it and typeset it into camera-ready copy.

RVT managing director C V Radhakrishnan said 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 released in 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," said Radhakrishnan. "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 added.

To incorporate corrections and editorial changes to the proof sheets, RVT designed a graphical spreadsheet interface for SJP. This also helped to save time in updating around 10,000 entries that had changed since the last directory was printed four years ago.

Recent reports have also noted the small but growing number of other industrial ventures moving to try out GNU/Linux in their ‘mission critical space’. Asian Paints, India’s largest paints company, has implemented SAP modules on GNU/Linux. IDBI Bank with its over 91 branches runs its core banking applications on it too. Rolta India runs its database containing thousands of users, while ICICI Infotech runs its knowledge management applications and C-DAC runs e-governance solutions on GNU/Linux.