I presented Publican at the Document Freedom Workshop 2012 at the Computer and Statistical Service Centre (CSSC), S N Bose Bhavan, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, West Bengal, India held between March 28-29, 2012.

Day I

A Mani 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 had presented Publican during FUDCon Pune 2011, 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 gave an introduction to LaTeX and Beamer with his “‘Golden Ratio’ for Typesetting - A quick and random introduction to LaTeX and Beamer” presentation. He used the Kile 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 and Damian Markham, who had come to present at another workshop on “Information and Security in Quantum World”. John Smolin is an avid Fedora user!

Day II

The first session on the second day was by Jit Ray Chowdhury on Moodle 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 then started his session on why document freedom is essential, and gave an introduction to Emacs org-mode, 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, A Mani, Partha Pratim Kundu, Malay Bhattacharya, and Tanmay Basu for the wonderful hospitality, and to Red Hat for sponsoring my travel.

The publican presentation is available. Few photos taken during the event are available in my /gallery.