Malayala Manorama's strange leap from Word to InDesign!

[MeditDesigner]

"Malayala Manorama" is a Malayalam language daily published from Kerala, India. Though a regional paper, they have a circulation of about 2 million which is quite respectable in India. Apparently they were using M.S.Word for their page layout (I wonder how!) and now they have upgraded to InDesign, whose interface has been customised to look like that of Word!

It is all in the Seybold report linked below. The PDF can be downloaded from Sansui, which did the software integration. (For getting this report direct from Seybold you would need a password.)

<http://www.sansuisoftware.com/download/Seybold_manorama.pdf>

The Seybold report says that Adobe has sold 300 licences to Manorama for this. Also, Malayalam fonts are rather complex and I wonder whether Adobe designed the fonts too.

Actually, this is a 2003 news, but I got it only today, so posting it here.

MeditDesigner

[George_Bilalis@adobeforums.com]

...Apparently they were using M.S.Word for their page layout (I wonder
how!)...




You are correct wondering. It reminds of second generation photo typesetting in galley mode and doing layout by hand (circa 1980 and later). In such a workflow, Word might be enough producing single column justified text.

As for dressing ID to resemble Word (LOL), Guinness book of records refers to other weird 'prima vistas' as well!

rgrds
George

[Thomas_Phinney@adobeforums.com]

I can say that they didn't get the fonts from Adobe. I don't know what their source was.

Cheers,

T

[MeditDesigner]

And theirs is one of the few regional newspapers you can access from an electronic kiosk. I was able to get one printed at Cairo. Excellent quality. Must be PDF. Bit expensive though, at 4 dollars or so.