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If I had to use a cross-platform, Linux and Mac OS X drawing application I'd use Cenon:

http://www.cenon.info/

Doesn't LyX have good xfig integration though?

You may also want to look into tools like pstricks and eukleides.

William

while Apple is pushing Cocoa.

If Apple could've purchased a company, I wish it'd been Macromedia before Adobe got to them, and I _still_ wish that FreeHand had been saved one last time and that Adobe had been required to divest themselves of it.

Apple really should haul out the old Sketch.app code and update it to a nice modern drawing program, ideally one as efficient and productive as FreeHand.

William
(who needs to find the time to dig into Cenon's, http://www.cenon.info/ codebase)

AFAIK Corel PhotoPaint, Ulead PhotoImpact and PaintShop Pro don't have PhotoShop's Healing Brush or support for multi-channel images.

CorelDRAW isn't available in an up-to-date version for Mac OS X.

Adobe now owns FreeHand has ceased updating it and is dismantling it for patents and features to use in InDesign and Illustrator (which really hurts --- I really wish that Adobe owning it had been disallowed by the FTC again). I'd really like to see an alternative develop and the best alternative I can see is Cenon, http://www.cenon.info/ --- see my post http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.gnustep.discuss /msg/5593b1cb0ef1feef

While I agree with the motives behind your post, the cold, hard reality is that Adobe is moving into having a monopoly on graphic design applications / tools and technologies (and more important, patents, including UI patents).

It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't doing such a poor job of providing efficient user interfaces and features:

  - the layer palette in InDesign and Illustrator takes quite a bit more clicking / dragging as is really necessary
  - InDesign is sorely lacking in long document features --- still no support for switching number of columns in a text frame, index formatting is severely limited &c.
  - PhotoShop still has weird UI / implementation issues --- choose multi-channel mode and type layers are no longer an option

and their up-dating of the Macromedia apps which they are keeping has been limited, most notably, no OpenType or Unicode support.

Fortunately there are interesting tools like XeTeX, http://scripts.sil.org/xetex which allow me to avoid using InDesign and Quark save for when absolutely necessary at work.

William

There is an EXCELLENT Illustrator alternative for GNUstep, called Cenon. There is also an OS X version. You may find more about it at http://www.cenon.info/frame_gb.html

> And still could be someday - after all, Linux desktops are such a melting pot of different toolkits and environments, that perhaps some "killer GNUStep apps" (graphics apps,
> like an Illustrator clone would be a good start) could get people to notice GNUStep again.

Well, fancy this, there *IS* a GNUstep killer app, called Cenon, available at http://www.cenon.info/ . It also happens to run under OS X.

Tony said:
>Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web on a NeXT.

Other interesting programs which began on NeXTstep:

  - FreeHand v4 (essentially a port to Windows and the Mac of Altsys Virtuoso v2)
  - Doom
  - Lotus Improv
  - Stone Design's Create
  - sBook

An interesting opensource app w/ NeXTstep roots:

  - http://www.cenon.info/

William

How so ? Not A Problem, ... if you are not using something that's not implemented in GNUstep, obviously. Of course, it can be very annoying (cocoa bindings aren't implemented yet, so if you use them...). Even then, a few #if#def to replace the offending code with another solution can prove to be quite simple to do (as most of the code can still be ported easily)...

Frankly, I think that if you can get rather complex apps like GNUmail or Cenon running both on OSX and on GNUstep, surely it's in the domain of the reality, not just pie in the sky.

The problem is more about OSX developers not beeing really interested in porting their apps to linux. On the other hand, they are very interested to port their app to Windows, but somehow most of them just wait for Apple to release YellowBox and/or wait for a good GNUstep/Windows port, with very few actually helping GNUstep (sure, not that surprising...)

Note that GNUstep/Windows status is getting better, although GNUstep apps aren't integrated graphically with Windows, at least now it kinda work (eg like addresses, but more importantly, Gorm (the GNUstep gui builder) compiles on Windows since a few releases).

Imagine running GNUStep on OpenDarwin and being able to run all Mac apps -- that's what the goal ought to be!

Not Possible. GNUstep is not Wine, it's not binary compatible with Cocoa, it's source compatible (mostly).

Anyway, sure, it's not always as easy as a simple recompilation from OSX to GNUstep, but it often is. And when it's not.. it's not that difficult to do the "port", in my opinion/experience, particularly with recent progresses with nib loading (not complete yet, but very close now).

Xara is a tool I've often wished that I liked when I tried it. Can't recall the last time I tried a demo or a copy from a magazine disk, but the following things from FreeHand I'm not finding equivalents to in my quest for a replacement for FreeHand and Altsys Virtuoso:

  - snap to document-setup-page (AI in particular doesn't do this, and it irritates me a lot and wastes a lot of time when trying to get art set to a standard size for a job)

  - ability to place bezier curve points, and move just placed points and constrain and control off-curve points with a single tool

  - easy deletion of nodes on a bezier path

  - quick selection of stacked objects (Freehand allows one to Control-click through a stack, AI makes one use a contextual menu or the layer palette, or if it's only a two-deep stack and you want the bottom, select both, then deselect the top)

  - easy expansion of a selection (in FreeHand just tap the tilde key (`) and a sub-selected path's selection is expanded to the compleat object)

  - sensible alignment of objects (AI in particular has bizarre rules for this --- so bizarre there's a plug-in to address this)

  - ability to align sub-selected bezier on-curve points to objects while not altering any other points in an object (AI can't do this)

  - use PostScript code for strokes and fills --- especially nice for doing dimension lines (Canvas has this built in though, while there're plug-ins for AI)

  - graphic find and replace

  - OpenType and Unicode support and a decent Type palette (Adobe Illustrator CS and CS2 really shine on this front. The nifty opensource program Cenon (http://www.cenon.info/ does quite nicely in its Mac OS X incarnation using Apple Advanced Typography). See http://members.aol.com/willadams/gnustep/type/inde x.html for a discussion of this sort of thing.

William

So graphical tools are good for this problem-space, depending upon your needs.

Here're two projects inspired by Microsoft Journal:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/jarnal/

http://www.adebenham.com/gournal/

Depending on your needs, you might find a drawing program of use --- I use Futurewave SmartSketch (old PenPoint program ported to Mac OS and Windows which morphed into Flash) on my Stylistic 2300

So look at

http://www.cenon.info/

or use GIMP for bitmaps

If you do a lot of math, you may find the Freehand Formula Entry System (FFES) of use:

http://www.cs.queensu.ca/drl/ffes/

William

Cenon - http://www.cenon.info/ --- interesting NeXT CAD/CAM program making the jump to opensource illustration. Runs on OPENSTEP, Linux (w/ GNUstep installed) and Mac OS X

Intaglio - http://www.purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/ --- Mac OS X native program able to make use of Apple Advanced Typography / ATSUI and other Mac OS X technologies. Commercial, but demo available.

There's apparently a graphing calculator in Mac OS X w/ does nifty things, and I'm surprised that Mathematica, MATLAB and METAPOST weren't mentioned (not really drawing programs, but if pstricks is gonna be included....)

For people running Windows:

EVE - http://www.goosee.com/goosee/index.shtml - small, free, symbols &c. available for it.

William
(who really wishes Macromedia had gone back to the Altsys Virtuoso code when it was time to move FreeHand to Mac OS X so that FH could've had decent typographic font access &c.)

The nicest LaTeX front-end is LyX, http://www.lyx.org/

The only pdf-editor like things around are drawing programs --- although Enfocus Tailor.app would do pretty much as you wish for PostScript documents, but it's not that accessible given that you need a NeXT or a copy of OPENSTEP to use it. The most reliable way to edit a .pdf is to use the Adobe Acrobat plug-in Enfocus PitStop. Not cheap. Not word-processor like (editing more than a character or two is a study in tediousness).

Using drawing programs to open up arbitrary .pdfs can be workable, but isn't word-processor-like --- that said, I've done it in the past (one example, book done in a proprietary composition program (Miles 33 for the morbidly curious) which needed reprint corrections --- open up the relevant chapters in FreeHand 8, get _all_ of the pages and formatting (after a few minor tweaks) then re-assemble the text blocks which want editing). These days I'd probably use Cenon for this, http://www.cenon.info/ (not saying it's as good as FH8, but at least it's viable today on decent OSes and being opensource is more likely to improve than FreeHand since its purchase by Adobe)

As an alternative, opening up a .pdf and directly converting it to .rtf is a useful option and may be more workable for you --- Marcel Weiher's TextLightning.app for Mac OS X (shareware at http://www.metaobject.com/ ) is one of the best programs for this.

NeoOffice has been workable for me thus far. For a spreadsheet in Mac OS X I've been using Flexisheet from Material Arts (opensource Lotus Improv / Quantrix clone).

William

I point you at Cenon http://www.cenon.info/ which does the vector dance. Amongst other things.