In a progressive module

They showed the way to desk-top publishing in Indian languages. R R Joshi, Meena Joshi and M N Cooper continue their tryst with the knowledge industry through digitalisation of books from the world’s big libraries.

Meena Joshi, R R Joshi and M N Cooper

In these times dominated by pace, one has to keep running to be in the same place. Modular Infotech has however defied this norm and successfully demonstrated that one can keep running and yet achieve newer goals; not remain confined to one place.

The company that did pioneering work in bringing Indian language based software to India’s masses is today advancing into the sunrise zones of digitalisation of libraries and archival data, software solutions for retail business, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management and e-Governance.

R R Joshi, his wife Meena and friend and colleague Dr M N Cooper founded Modular Systems in 1983, leaving their well-paid jobs and investing their entire savings. They began with a design and development assignment from Bharat Dynamics Limited. This involved developing an automatic card tester for missile electronics.

The company made pioneering efforts in developing a completely indigenous CRT based phototypesetter and in two years’ time developed Phototypesetter PTS100, the first phototypesetter developed in India using digital techniques, without any external collaboration. It consisted of microprocessor based front-end data entry terminal with multilingual editing facility. Typesetting programmes for all Indian languages were developed taking into account different composition rules of each language. Modular was the first to develop in-house facility to digitalise Indian language typefaces. Later, the company reoriented its developmental activities to take up the challenge of digital technology and developed a desk-top publishing package having screen preview facility.

The package was well received by the DTP market since it catered to the long standing requirements that were unfulfilled by the English language based software. Other packages such as Laserset, Scriptmaster and Chitralekha followed, and formed the basis of Modular’s flagship publishing software – Shree Lipi. This MS Windows based software has Indian language fonts, keyboard handlers and a host of other utilities commonly required for desktop publishing. These utilities include text editor, font styler, keyboard tutor or import utilities.

Modular Infotech has had a long standing business relationship with TVS Electronics. With the help of the latter’s network spread across India, Modular has been successful in reaching all the corners of the country. In the year 2000, TVSE consolidated its association with Modular by buying equity stake in the company.

The association has firmed up and has also extended to the newer lines of activities Modular has been venturing into.

Sensing the early signs of saturation in the language software business and the government sector’s inclination in favour of big players such as Microsoft, Modular has started looking for newer fields in which to spread its activities. One of these is the data conversion market. The company has taken up projects from overseas clients for digitalisation of archival data. It is currently handling conversion of books into digital format for a Singapore based library.