PageMaker to InDesign Migration for Assamese Publishing: A Practical Guide
A concrete migration guide for Assamese publishing houses moving from PageMaker 6.5 to InDesign — covering Geetanjali font incompatibility, the Rupantarak conversion bridge, rebuilding paragraph styles, and font substitution strategy.
Why Migration Is Harder Than It Looks
Switching from PageMaker to InDesign is not a software upgrade — it is a platform migration that touches every part of your production workflow. For Assamese publishers, this is compounded by the font encoding barrier: Geetanjali, the font system that most Assamese PageMaker installations depend on, is architecturally incompatible with InDesign’s Unicode text engine.
InDesign CC operates on Unicode throughout. Every character in an InDesign document is stored as a Unicode code point. Its OpenType shaping engine applies GSUB and GPOS rules to render correct conjuncts, matras, and ligatures from Unicode font files. When a Geetanjali-encoded text block — which is fundamentally ASCII bytes with font substitution — enters this pipeline, the results are unpredictable but always wrong.
For a deeper technical explanation of why this happens at the byte level, see the Unicode vs Geetanjali architecture blog and the history of Assamese font encoding.
The Migration Path: Five Phases
Phase 1: Encoding Audit (Week 1)
Before any other migration work, catalog every file in your production archive:
- Count PageMaker files by encoding type (most will be Geetanjali, but some may be Ramdhenu or Bikash)
- Identify which templates are in active production vs archival
- Identify any files that already contain Unicode Assamese text (from copy received from reporters)
- Inventory all custom fonts beyond Geetanjali: headline display fonts, masthead fonts, advertisement typefaces
This audit determines the scope of conversion work and prevents encoding mismatches during the transition.
Phase 2: Convert Active Content (Weeks 1–2)
Use Rupantarak to convert the editorial text content in active PageMaker files from Geetanjali encoding to Unicode. Rupantarak processes batch conversions at 2000 pages per 42 seconds, so the mechanical conversion time is not the bottleneck — the bottleneck is verification.
Critical verification steps:
- Check converted output for conjunct accuracy on a sample of 10–15 pages per font type
- Pay particular attention to the Assamese-specific characters: ৰ (U+09F0) and ৱ (U+09F1), which must be correctly distinguished from similar Bangla characters
- Verify that hasanta (্, virama) sequences survive the conversion and do not drop silently
- Compare printed output of original Geetanjali version against Unicode rendering to catch systematic mapping errors
Phase 3: Rebuild Templates in InDesign (Weeks 2–4)
Do not attempt to auto-convert PageMaker templates to InDesign via the PageMaker plug-in for production use. Use the PageMaker file as a visual reference and rebuild each template from scratch in InDesign. This is labor-intensive but unavoidable — auto-converted PageMaker templates carry inherited structural problems that compound over time.
Template rebuild checklist:
- Master pages — Recreate running headers, footers, page numbers, column guides
- Paragraph styles — Rebuild every paragraph style using Unicode Assamese font (Noto Serif Bengali or preferred alternative)
- Character styles — Recreate bold, italic, and emphasis styles with Unicode font metrics
- Column grid — Note that Geetanjali’s character metrics differ from Unicode fonts; column widths may need adjustment for comparable text density
- Headline styles — Select Unicode display fonts that visually match existing Geetanjali headline appearance
- Table styles — Recreate any standard table formats for classified ads, sports results, weather grids
The column width issue is non-trivial. Geetanjali’s character widths were determined by the font designer’s choices in the 1990s. Unicode fonts have different metrics. A column that fit 30 Geetanjali characters per line may fit 28 or 32 characters in a Unicode font at the same point size. This requires proofreading at the column-fitting level, not just the character level.
Phase 4: Font Substitution Strategy
Identify every font currently in use across your PageMaker installation and map each to its Unicode replacement. A one-to-one match does not always exist.
| PageMaker Font (Legacy) | Unicode Replacement | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Geetanjali (body) | Noto Serif Bengali | Closest in x-height and stroke weight |
| Geetanjali Bold | Noto Serif Bengali Bold | Verify bold conjunct rendering |
| Geetanjali (headline) | Mukti / Kalpurush | Compare glyph proportions visually |
| Ramdhenu (if used) | Noto Serif Bengali | Convert text via Rupantarak first |
| Bikash (if used) | Any Unicode Assamese font | Convert text via Rupantarak first |
| English body fonts | Retain originals | English fonts are already Unicode-compatible |
Phase 5: Parallel Production and Handover (Weeks 4–8)
Run both PageMaker and InDesign pipelines simultaneously for a minimum of two production cycles (two print issues) before committing to InDesign as the sole production system. This identifies workflow gaps that no amount of testing reveals: deadline-pressure behaviors, operator muscle-memory shortcuts, press-compatibility issues with the new PDF output format.
See the Assamese DTP software guide for a full comparison of DTP tools available for the Assamese publishing ecosystem.
The Geetanjali Archive: What Stays in PageMaker
Not everything migrates. Historical archives — issues from 2000–2015, for example — are best left in PageMaker format for reference access. The cost of converting and relaying the entire archive into InDesign is prohibitive for most publishers and provides limited practical benefit.
Establish a clear policy: PageMaker is the archive access system; InDesign is the active production system. For any archive content that must be reprinted or repurposed, convert the relevant files through Rupantarak at the time of need rather than attempting a bulk archive migration upfront.
After Migration: The Unicode Advantage
Once InDesign is running on Unicode Assamese content, a range of previously impossible capabilities become available:
- Full-text search in PDFs and exported documents
- Web export (EPUB, HTML) with correct Assamese text
- PDF/X-4 compliance for modern commercial printing
- Copy-paste fidelity — text pasted from InDesign is searchable, correct Assamese
- Accessibility — screen reader compatibility for digital editions
The migration investment pays off most visibly in web and digital publishing. Any Assamese publisher with a website or app edition will see immediate quality improvements in the digital content stream once the print pipeline moves to Unicode.
For typing in the new InDesign Unicode workflow, the Jahnabi Pro Keyboard provides professional Unicode Assamese input with 500+ calligraphic fonts designed for print DTP. For any book digitization projects that arise during the transition, DRISTI OCR can extract Unicode text from scanned pages, eliminating manual retyping. See the complete book digitization workflow for how OCR fits into a full digitization pipeline. For the day-to-day reality of operating a dual-encoding newsroom during the transition, see the Assamese newspaper DTP workflow article.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I open PageMaker Assamese files directly in InDesign?
InDesign CS4 and later include a PageMaker plug-in that can open .pm6 and .p65 files. However, for Assamese PageMaker files, font compatibility is the critical problem: InDesign will open the file but the Geetanjali-encoded text will display incorrectly because InDesign does not support legacy font encoding systems. The text requires conversion to Unicode before it becomes usable in InDesign.
What happens to Geetanjali fonts in InDesign?
InDesign can use Geetanjali as a display font — it will show the characters visually — but InDesign's text engine is Unicode-based and applies OpenType shaping rules, which conflict with the encoding structure of Geetanjali. Text formatted with Geetanjali in InDesign may appear correct visually but will produce corrupt PDF output with broken text search, incorrect copy-paste, and PDF/X compliance failures.
How long does a PageMaker to InDesign migration take for an Assamese newspaper?
For a standard Assamese daily newspaper with 12–16 page templates, expect 4–8 weeks of migration work: 1–2 weeks for template audit and InDesign rebuild, 1–2 weeks for font conversion of the active article archive using Rupantarak, 1–2 weeks of parallel production (running both systems simultaneously), and 1–2 weeks for operator retraining and workflow stabilization.
Which Unicode Assamese fonts work best as Geetanjali replacements in InDesign?
Noto Serif Bengali provides the most comprehensive Unicode coverage and is actively maintained by Google. Kalpurush (by Ananda) is widely used in Bengali publishing and covers the full Assamese repertoire. Mukti (SIL) is a good open-source option. For matching existing Geetanjali print output as closely as possible, compare x-height, stroke weight, and conjunct glyph design between options — there is no single 'Geetanjali equivalent' in Unicode fonts.