Whether you’re a graphic designer/desktop publisher by trade or a stay-at-home parent who likes to edit children’s photos, we have tools in this blog to help save you both time and money! As everything has gone digital, we have all been forced to learn to use some of the tools necessary to modify pictures and create standard electronic documents. Adobe has built their niche in this marketplace, building industry-leading products from the beginning; however, what we are about to uncover is that there are many open source alternatives to these highly- priced proprietary solutions. In the next couple of paragraphs we are going to discuss a few of our favorite open source applications for use in the graphic design and desktop publishing fields.
“GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring” –http://www.gimp.org
This is not your ordinary Windows “Paint” program, but rather a full-fledged contender to Adobe’s Photoshop product, without the licensing. Much like the expensive proprietary solutions, GIMP has been designed to utilize a plug-in and extension architecture which allows it to do simple photo retouching all the way up to complex scripting.
“Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.” – http://www.inkscape.org
Inkscape is becoming a strong contender in the desktop publishing space and can be used for projects such as web graphics, icons, logos, brochures and other printed material. The best part of it all is that it’s free to use and distribute for any purpose, both commercial and non-commercial, with no restrictions!
“PDFCreator is a free tool to create We have only discussed a few open source applications which we have had firsthand experience using. There are literally thousands of other projects that fit into this category, so do some more digging and you will be surprised at what you find. Don’t miss our next blog post covering open source productivity applications . . . . follow us on LinkedIn, become a friend on Facebook, or sign up for our email Subscription!
If you start to dig around there are tons of free tools in the open source market to do everything from creating, to editing, and finally converting documents in PDF formats. PDFCreator is similar to a Windows printer, therefore, anything you can print can be converted to PDF! PDFedit is a full-fledged PDF creation and editing tool similar to Adobe Acrobat Professional, only free-of-charge!
