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First we'll toss in one some people will kick and scream about: Graphic Design. Yes, I know all about the Gimp.

I disagree.

Not about the GIMP; for production work on raster images it doesn't make sense to leave the known comforts of PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro for a FOSS equivalent that might do the job as well, but offers no significant improvements. Yet tomorrow's graphics designers are currently on student budgets and are learning The GIMP because of that— something that should be making Adobe nervous about tomorrow's profits.

But Blender and POV-Ray are major presences in animation and ray tracing work: many of the younger people working in the field cut their teeth on these, and still use them for exploring some concepts. Inkscape has compatibility benefits over Illustrator and is beginning to attract commercial use for that reason, even though it is a long way from its v1.0. Scribus is poised to shoulder its way into first tier desk top publishing.

FOSS has become majorily important in the graphics sector.

I don't know anything about audio mixers. Maybe the value of 1 kazillion is closer to 10 than to 8. Maybe FOSS products like Audacity are making significant inroads among the independent bands. I've no idea.

I know nothing about games, either. I know a lot of tomorrow's animators and game designers are developing their techniques with Blender and POV-Ray— I expect that they will continue to use these to some degree when they get paying jobs.

There is no longer a necessity to use photoshop or other commercial/proprietary programs. I switched to using only Free Software in my webdesign company almost two years ago, and though I spent some weeks in transition learning the new software, I now work a lot more efficiently. This is partly thanks to CLI applications like ImageMagick, but I also find that for most work, the FOSS counterparts of Adobe's applications are much more efficient to use; they are a lot faster, handles larger files, are not cluttered up with un-needed functionality, and are more easily customized. Another advantage of using FOSS is that a lot of proprietary software tends to lead the user towards a more or less predefined goal as to how the final output should look, resulting in, amongst other things, a lot of templatish pages on the web.

My recommended line of design tools are:

GIMP (Who needs Photoshop?)
Krita (For those rare moments when CMYK are required)
Inkscape (For vector graphics and experimenting with layout)
Quanta (For making the actual webpages)
Scribus (For making professional PDF's)

Unfortunately, there are no FOSS applications able to make flash files like Flash does, but my needs have been well served by SWF Tools and OpenOffice.org's ability to export presentations to swf, and I expect to see some great development in this area now that Adobe has opened its action script engine.

It did the job for what I was trying to do, but I would have been happier to use an actual CAD program.

Define "good". gaim does a fine job for me with AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and Google IM services (as well as IRC and non-Google Jabber servers). I believe the video/audio support is still not present, but for text purposes, it's fine.

5) Greeting card software (anything good on the linux end?)

Doubtful for straight up specialized software. However, one with an artistic bent might appreciate trying out the suite of GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, and Scribus. If all he wants to do is fill in templates, though, it will be inadequate. If he's feeling really generous, though, he could potentially develop a template and submit it for inclusion at Inkscape or Scribus, and maybe add some more stuff to Open ClipArt to help others as well.

Best of all, you can get him hooked prior to hitting Linux, because everything I just named has a Windows version.

We have content creators that were thriving because of DRM-- the content creators wouldn't have put the same kind of time and effort into their creations if they couldn't be protected. And we have all that business coming to an abrupt close because of open source development.

Uh, whoa whoa whoa ... since when has "open source development" meant "making unauthorized copies"?

You can't lump together the people working on independently creating something like Inkscape with the people distributing cracked copies of Illustrator. They are two completely separate things.

The latter, conventionally called "piracy" (rightly or wrongly), is why those businesses are coming to an abrupt close, facilitated by the fact that their business models were not particularly sound in the face of that reality.

- Does GIMP support 16-bit color/CMYK separation?

I used GIMP years ago some, but now I plan on getting more into photography and 16 bit color space is one of the things I've heard that PH has over GIMP, that GIMP doesn't support it. Someone else suggested I try Inkscape. As a vector graphics editor I don't know how well it is editing photos though.

How about an application that is intended to draw circles (among other things of course). GIMP is used for many things, but it is made primary for photo editing not drawing.

I think that just making them even more consistent will go a long way.

But for the image mockup stage I have a somewhat unorthodox suggestion. Try Scribus. Since you are doing visual layout anyway, why not use a software that actually is designed to create and manipulate such? Different elements are not tied to graphical layers, and dropping sample texts into them is dead simple.

I have a better idea: use Inkscape. Faster than Scribus, much better tools for lining things up, and generally much better in drawing tools. The resulting SVG might even be directly usable in the page in some circumstances (intraweb application used with Firefox), and can be exported to pixel image files in any case.

Altought, for the first design phase, pen&paper are the king. They're still far superior to everything else as far as ease of use and flexibility are concerned.

Inkscape is perfect for this sort of thing. I've used it many times.

Running the 0.7 version under Fedora (build 1560) and it looks good so far but haven't done a great deal with it. It's still missing a lot of the bells and whistles (animation, color management), but basic functionality is there. Xara EPS exports open right up in Ghostscript/Scribus so it's already useful on some level.

Apparently, the crew over at Inkscape http://www.inkscape.org/ are collaborating in some way with the Xara people so it will be interesting to see if/how this changes/improves either app.

* * * * * *

Adobe Illustrator is a software engineer's misconception of how an artist works.
CorelDraw is an artist's misconception of how a software engineer works.

Inkscape seems to be a pretty capable package already (and it supports svg)

We're working on it: Inkscape If you're handy with a compiler, or can wield a gtkmm, give us a hand!

First, they have X11 listed incorrectly as a PPC app. If you have an Intel based Mac then the installation CDs includes a pkg of X11 as a Universal app.

Once you have X11 installed then you can also get ...

1) Inkscape (Universal) ... for all of your SVG editing needs.

2) Gimp (Universal) ... for all of your raster image editing needs.

... and I am surprised that they left Eclipse off of the list. While Xcode is preferred for doing OS X development, it is still worth a mention :-)

I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I use most.

GIMP doesn't do it, well, doesn't focus on it, similar to how PS doesn't focus on vector graphics.

There is a good little open source vector graphics app though, inkscape, that you can find here: http://www.inkscape.org/

I use Inkscape for this, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's not as feature-rich as recent versions of Corel Draw, for example, but it does what I need, and it's free.

If you just want to draw a diagram then Inkscape or Dia are probably what you are looking for. Inkscape should be fine for most uses of throwing together a simple diagram or drawing, while if you have slightly more pedantic or technical needs Dia offers a few features that can help (though being more technically inclined has a less helpful interface for just drawing pictures). GIMP is, like photoshop, primarily a photo and image manipulation (as opposed to creation) tool, and is great for working on, touching up, combining, etc. images, while its tools for raw image creation are a little lacking (which is reasinable given that that is not what it is designed to do.

Jedidiah.

There really needs to be a reference renderer for ODF. Something independent from OpenOffice, with examples of all of the grammar and semantics in the spec.

That is worrying. Could you please write a bug report:
http://inkscape.org/report_bugs.php

As for Dia like editing, besides a built in collection of artwork, and ability to output limited domain specific XML, Inkscape is a strict superset of Dia. In particular I think you'll like automatic connector routing, guidelines and automatic node layout.

I assume you are on Debian unstable (as ubuntu doesn't have 0.44 yet). I've used it at work, but I may be using my own private version for some reason. I'll try it tomorrow at work and see if I can reproduce this.

Open inkscape. Drag image in. Select imported image. Go Path -> Trace bitmap. You'll probably want to use the 'multiple scanning' options. Probably with fewer than the default 8 scans. Select created vectors. Open the fill & stroke dialog and set it to 'no fill' and a plain black stroke.

As always, you'll want to play with parameters to get good results.

You obviously have no idea what node sculpting is. Study this informative screenshot:

http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0 .44-nodesculpting.png

Speaking of font rendering, take a look at this screenshot -- what happened to the missing word "as"? It reads: "The paragraph contains spans of text styled differently well as forced line breaks..." instead of "... as well as...".

Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now.

Why, here ya go: Reporting Bugs.

http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inksca pe-0.44-outlineview.png thats just purely... simply... insane! I wish I had enought time/patience to do something like that.

'Tis updated now. We're still waiting on RPM and DEB packages. Gentoo users can get an ebuild here (if our wiki survives slashdot): http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingG entoo

How about this:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060430

That's a bit vague. However, it was actually being followed up on before that strip even hit the web. And among other pertinent things, Little CMS integration into Inkscape started shortly after Libre Graphics Meeting not too many weeks ago. Illiad hasn't covered any of the features he'd actually like for his workflow, but he has been asked.

As soon as the next release of Inkscape is done (starting any day now), then more CMS support will go in and also hit the UI. (So anyone who might want to use this, be sure to drop a note or some such).

• Photoshop: The GIMP - how many times does this need to be said, the interface is slightly different but the gimp has most of the features of photoshop plus a few of its own.
  Why don't I do the rest of the main Adobe stuff while I'm at it:
  
  • Pagemaker: Scribus
  • Illustrator: Inkscape
  
  
• Games: Cedega - but maybe you'd be better off using a console (not as in bash you blockhead) as they're cheap and while piracy for them is a bit harder its doable if you're commited.
• Autocad: a quick search reveals two commercial solutions LinuxCAD and VariCAD and a guide to getting AutoDesk's Autocad running under wine
• Dreamweaver: NVU, Amaya, hell even fckEditor or, if you're hardcore then vi(e)macs.

I'm not a scientist, but a geek interested in computer graphics and 3D modeling and just thought of share this tip with you guys hoping it may be useful.

When you design 3D graphics, you need a software tool to design your artwork in 3D and render it to get the final output. The Blender is one of the best open source 3D modeling and rendering tool. See the 'Art Gallery' section in the Blender home page to understand what you can do with it.

Another very useful 2D vector graphic design tool is Inkscape, this is similar to Adobe Illustrator, and again its open source.

The Gimp is similar to Adobe Photoshop and again this too open source.

Latest versions of these software are included into Tomahawk Desktop, this is a very useful multimedia Linux OS.

Either way, can you see anyone ever writing a library or API technology in JAVA, let alone an application that doesnt run like syrup on a cold day?

Yes. Batik, for example, is written in Java. Admittedly, it is much slower than Inkview in starting up and opening a file, or opening another file once started, but on the other hand, it supports filters (which inkview doesn't) and clips properly at image edge (inkview doesn't), and supports scripts and other niceties.

JAVA is over 10years old, and yet on P4 3.4ghz computers, you have to performance optimize even simple appliations to run reasonably well. Who in the heck thinks this is normal?

X86 assembly has been around since 1978, and even on a P4 3.5GHz computer you have to optimize to run well. I guess that means that assembly equals bad performance. It couldn't possibly be because "simple application" nowadays means something different than 10 years ago.

Not to say that Java is neccessarily a fast language, but saying that "you have to optimize to get good performance" is true for any programming language.

> Note that he's also asking for a free autorouter!

Why not try to borrow and build upon the autorouter in Inkscape?

One of the projects completed for Inkscape as part of the Google Summer of Code was "connectors... with automatic line routing". It was released in Inkscape 0.43. This code could certainly be adapted to autorouting for electronic design in a GPLed ECAD tool.

If enough people put their $400 "peanuts" towards improving the current libre electronic design tools, perhaps you could have your "library, router, gerber out and everything on your list" the next time you need it.

> Note that he's also asking for a free autorouter!

Why not try to borrow and build upon the autorouter in Inkscape?

One of the projects completed for Inkscape as part of the Google Summer of Code was "connectors... with automatic line routing". It was released in Inkscape 0.43. This code could certainly be adapted to autorouting for electronic design in a GPLed ECAD tool.

If enough people put their $400 "peanuts" towards improving the current libre electronic design tools, perhaps you could have your "library, router, gerber out and everything on your list" the next time you need it.

> Are there any fields that overlap with auto-router theory?

Yes, there certainly are. Or perhaps I should say, there are auto routing needs outside of electronic design. This is a general drawing issue and it was one of the projects completed for Inkscape during the summer of 2005 as part of the Google Summer of Code. The "connectors... with automatic line routing" was done by Michael Wybrow and released in Inkscape 0.43. This code could certainly be adapted to autorouting for electronic design in a GPLed ECAD tool.

> Are there any fields that overlap with auto-router theory?

Yes, there certainly are. Or perhaps I should say, there are auto routing needs outside of electronic design. This is a general drawing issue and it was one of the projects completed for Inkscape during the summer of 2005 as part of the Google Summer of Code. The "connectors... with automatic line routing" was done by Michael Wybrow and released in Inkscape 0.43. This code could certainly be adapted to autorouting for electronic design in a GPLed ECAD tool.

Together with InDesign and Illustrator, this would round out a complete Linux publishing solution that any professional could sit down at and get productive. I have prayed for this for most of the years I was working in graphic arts.

But if they don't come to the party - that's OK: We'll just keep polishing GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape etc until they start seriously eating into Adobe's monopoly (same way M$ lost the server market). Your move, Adobe!

PLEASE! If you are writing a windows program, or a program you plan to port to windows, do not use GTK+. It works terribly on that platform.

Eh? Gimp works great. So does Inkscape. I use those on WinXP all the time here at work, and I've never had a problem with them.

Can you name anything that doesn't work well?? Gtk2 is a beautiful toolkit, IMHO - it's so easy to get your head around it, and it's powerful, too. And there's bindings for just about any higher level language you could care to name.

I do the odd bit of low-tech graphics work for my employer, and I too am very saddened by the death of Freehand - the latest version of which will live hopefully forever on my machine. For my own modest needs, I can't see it becoming obsolete anytime soon. Even if I go 100% Linux in future, I'll have it running under Wine (which it does very nicely, along with the other MX '1.1' apps).

Uh... anyway, just wanted to say that Inkscape includes a vector-tracer that compares very nicely with Freehand's. It also saves as SVG, though you can also copy+paste paths into other apps. And although I haven't used Illustrator since v10, I'd say both of these apps take its tracer tool to the cleaners. Hopefully the Freehand trace engine will be adopted into Illustrator in Macrodobe Creative Studio MXP-tilde-starfish(TM).

Corel Land? Why not direct your boat to inkscape shores?

This annoucement just means less competition. Which is always bad for users...

The thing is, The Gimp doesn't make any sense for comics (and a lot of other things). Inkscape or similar vector drawing app would be a much better choice.

The Gimp is getting mightly outdated these days. Sheesh, 10 years and it's not a whole lot different from the original. I believe their main problem is the whole Gtk+ and C thing. Ugh, what a painful-to-use widget kit. They should have at least gone with C++ (or possibly some other language that makes development easier and faster than C). Don't get me wrong, I love C when used properly, but huge GUI applications is not where it shines.

Don't forget the beauty of Inkscape - the latest version v0.42.2 made it even cooler to use to create web-savy SVG that Firefox 1.5 now renders out of the box. I love those Calligraphic pen tools!

For another low fidelity mockup tool, try inkscape. Mockups and prototypes are two different animals. There is no interactivity with mockups unless they are talked though by a facilitator with the relevant stakeholders. This is called a paper prototype. A real prototype is an actual application that can be executed. It is usually somewhat limited in capability and tends to have nothing designed in it for scalability, security, portability, performance, etc. As stated earlier, prototypes can be throw away or not. If not throw away, then the tools you use for the prototype are the exact same tools that you are planning to use for the real thing.

It is also a vector one, like flash. (I believe you meant to say 'vector')
Runs under windows, linux; opensource, mature, and easy to use..
http://www.inkscape.org/

In re-defining page down to the sentences across which I scan hopping from structure to sructure down what I (very naively, obviously!) call a page, you miss the fact that these things are not individually accessed via HTTP and assembled, the whole thing (let's call it an HTML document, if you want to redefine the semantics of page) is one from the point of view of hyperlinking (save for anchors, which are completely inadequate).

If I understood you correctly, you are complaining that you can't link to a specific point in a HTML page, unless the page make has specifically marked that position with an <a name="gibberish"> tag. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

But what choice is there ? Any possible way around this would either

1. Require that the document is never altered after creation (the various "nth item from the top, nth line from the top, nth character from the beginning" -schemes) or
2. Require that the document maker gives every paragraph/item in the page an identificator (which is no different than the current situation with the a name -tag), or
3. Build document on the client side by pulling down document fragments, allowing you to link to an individual fragment (which would cause a lot more overhead to HTTP servers, and also require that document authors properly divide their documents to fragments, which would be extra work for them than therefore even less likely than marking every paragraph with a name -tag).

Besides, in no case could you simply construct new documents by reusing fragments of other documents; that would basically be the textual equivalent of hotlinking images.

Anyway, what I find really interesting is the idea of being able to embed other kinds of XML into XHTML. This would allow putting things like images (with SVG) directly to the HTML file, getting rid of HTMLs greatest weakness - the need to separate the document into several files.

Try http://www.inkscape.org/... It's free, open-source, and can produce some phenomenal results.

If you read their FAQ, they are more than aware of the existence of Inkscape. They give credit to Inkscape for "features that Xara does not have" and a higher rate of development. In fact, they say that the ultimate goal is a single merged vector editor combining the best in Xara and Inkscape. And as an Inkscape developer, this is something I'd like to see as well.

It remains to be seen how exactly this merger will proceed, who will be on the giving side and who on the receiving side. Whichever way it goes, however, their goal is the same as mine: to create the best vector editor in the world. So I guess this means Xara and Inkscape are bound to be friends overall, even though an element of competition will be present as well.

For an overview of how Inkscape and Xara compare, read this:

http://wiki.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Xara_X

As far as I can tell, GIMP is missing that feature on purpose, because it's out of the scope of what it's designed to do. For actually drawing shapes from scratch, you should use a vector program, such as Inkscape. Incidentally, the article mentions that they added a feature such that you can copy and paste SVG from Inkscape to GIMP (assuming Inkscape supports it, that is).

yeah, I don't understand why people have such a hard time with that...

It's annoying when people try to use the "GNU image MANIPULATION program" to create illustrations... Same with photoshop. To people who ask me simple things like how to draw basic shapes in photoshop, I ask why they don't use illustrator. And to people asking those questions in GIMP, I point them to Inkscape (disclaimer: I have never used inkscape, so I can't vouch for its usefulness).

although photoshop added shape tools (mostly worthless, imo) relatively recently, there's really no reason for GIMP to follow. Unless, of course, they're trying to clone photoshop.

All I can tell you is: use the right tool! Gimp is not a vector-drawing tool, it's a raster image editing tool. If you want to draw circles and do other vector graphics stuff, use something like Inkscape. The export it to raster (or import the vector image from Gimp) to compose your drawing with the photos you were editing.

Try Inkscape, it handles the stuff you want to do with text really well (IMHO).

But yeah, on the wider Windows stuff, it comes from the wider open source community, and isn't Linux only (eg. things like Inkscape, Ethereal, Orbiter, Celestia, Blender, ...). They're all stand-outs, and they'll all either still be here with us in 20 years, or some better open-source software will have surpassed them.

for the novice at least...

Gimp's interface sucks because the windows are always misplaced, the tools options are all different sizes so they don't fit naturally in any group. So it's always messy, with tools in different positions on the screen, etc.

Photoshop sucks because the floating palettes are always overtop of some part of the image you want to see and they are a pain to re-arrange. It also sucks because it basically takes over the whole screen to be usable, so you can do nothing else at the same time or have to keep switching back and forth.

I'm posted this before on the Firefox article, but it really deserves repeating that Inkscape's UI is really, really good and is what the gimp should be modelled after, not photoshop. Editing SVG is far more complicated, but the inkscape UI is simple, takes up almost no space, and is easy to use. Maybe it wouldn't be good for serious graphic artists, but at least for new users and casual use a gimp that looked like that would be much better than either photoshop or the current gimp ui.