Some of my young friends engaged in printing and publishing are thinking about transferring to FLOSS OS, or at least printing in FLOSS environment. The problems they are facing are these:

1. Printing in mirror. This is very crucial, because, usually two pages are printed on the same page, for which usually a page-layout software like pagemaker is used in proprietary frameworks. Scribus is an open alternative, but, most probably Indic printing, or particularly Bangla printing cannot be done in Scribus. If someone knows that it can be done, can the links for the documentation be provided here, please? This cannot be done with postscript printers too, where mirror printing can be done, because two pages together get mirrored there, not one page at a time. They can use pdfnup to bring two pages into one page, but, still the mirror printing cannot be done. The usual custom in Calcutta is to take tracing, that is mirror prints on tracing paper, and then proceed into printing from that tracing.

2. Page number in Bangla. This is also a very necessary point. Because, in OOo, they have to insert the page numbers manually if they want it in Bangla. Is there any way to do it in Bangla in OOo?

They are eager to go into printing in Unicode using FLOSS things. But, they cannot, as it seems, from the state of the things. I want to focus attention of all FLOSS people into this matter. The lack of virus threat, abundance of different text-processing SW in FLOSS, and the ease of writing or typing in Unicode Bangla allure them into the plan, but they cannot do it, due these technical problems.