[PLUG] [Event Report] Document Freedom Workshop 2012, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India, March 28-29, 2012

[Shakthi Kannan]

Hi,

I presented an introduction to Publican [1] at the Document Freedom
Workshop 2012 [2] at the Computer and Statistical Service Centre
(CSSC) [3], S N Bose Bhavan, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
[4], West Bengal, India held between March 28-29, 2012.

Day I

A Mani [5] started the day's proceedings with an introduction to
Free/Libre/Open Source Software, and basic shell commands. We had a
computer lab with Fedora installed where the participants used the
terminal to try out the hands-on exercises.

I then introduced Publican to the audience comprising mostly of
students and faculty. Jared Smith [6] had presented Publican during
FUDCon Pune 2011 [7], and, with his permission, I added more content
and a lab section. The participants were able to use Publican to
create and build documents with Bengali content!

After lunch, Sourav Sen Gupta [8] gave an introduction to LaTeX [9]
and Beamer [10] with his "'Golden Ratio' for Typesetting - A quick and
random introduction to LaTeX and Beamer" presentation. He used the
Kile [11] editor to demonstrate LaTeX markups and for generating PDF
files. I helped the students with the lab session in writing, and
troubleshooting warnings and errors when using Kile with pdflatex.

I also met and spoke with two physicists, John Smolin [12] and Damian
Markham [13], who had come to present at another workshop on
"Information and Security in Quantum World" [14]. John Smolin is an
avid Fedora user!

Day II

The first session on the second day was by Jit Ray Chowdhury [15] on
Moodle [16] CMS. He started with the basics of installing Apache,
MySQL and PHP on Fedora, followed by creating a simple HTML, and PHP
page. Participants then learnt how to install Drupal, Moodle and
configure the same.

Prof. Nagarjuna [17] then started his session on why document freedom
is essential, and gave an introduction to Emacs org-mode [18], with
examples. I also met Krishnakant Mane but couldn't attend his
(post-lunch) session on "LibreOffice and Screen Readers" as I had to
leave early to catch a flight.

Thanks to the organizing committee: Prof. Mandar Mitra [19], A Mani,
Partha Pratim Kundu, Malay Bhattacharya [20], and Tanmay Basu for the
wonderful hospitality, and to Red Hat for sponsoring my travel.

The publican presentation is available at:

  http://shakthimaan.com/downloads.html#publican

Few photos taken during the event are available in my /gallery:

  http://www.shakthimaan.com/Mambo/gallery/album79

SK

[1] Publican. https://fedorahosted.org/publican/

[2] Document Freedom Workshop 2012.
http://www.ilug-cal.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=185

[3] Computer and Statistical Service Centre. http://www.isical.ac.in/~cssc/

[4] Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. http://www.isical.ac.in/

[5] A Mani. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Amani

[6] Jared Smith. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jsmith

[7] FUDCon Pune 2011. http://fudcon.in/

[8] Sourav Sen Gupta. http://souravsengupta.com/

[9] LaTeX. http://www.latex-project.org/

[10] Beamer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_%28LaTeX%29

[11] Kile. http://kile.sourceforge.net/

[12] John Smolin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Smolin

[13] Damian Markham. http://www.infres.enst.fr/~markham/

[14] "Information and Security in Quantum World" workshop.
http://www.isical.ac.in/~coec/workshop/quant2012.html

[15] Jit Ray Chowdhury. http://www.jitrc.com/

[16] Moodle. http://moodle.org/

[17] Prof. Nagarjuna. http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/people/academic/nagarjuna-g

[18] Emacs org-mode. http://orgmode.org/

[19] Prof. Mandar Mitra. http://www.isical.ac.in/~mandar/

[20] Malay Bhattacharyya. http://www.isical.ac.in/~malay_r/

-- 
Shakthi Kannan
http://www.shakthimaan.com