Slashdot Mirror
29 Vector Drawing Programs
Ed Pegg writes "I did a survey of all available vector-based drawing programs, in anticipation of SVG in the next Firefox. I found 29 different vector drawing programs. Of these, 14 were free or open source. More than I expected. Did I miss any good ones?"
Did I miss any good ones?
More importantly, did you FIND any good ones? (and could you have written a less informative post?)
I've found that for producing vector figures (mostly for research papers) OmniGraffle is pretty amazing. Its not free, but supports far more features than dia (such as helping you auto align and create symmetric figures). Also the interface seems nice and well done.
Phil
cat > file.ps
10 10 moveto
50 50 lineto
stroke
showpage
Perhaps cat is not the easiest to use, but it easily the most powerful and easier to control from another program! It can also be trivially scripted to produce eps and pdf, or later updated with $EDITOR.
Only ZuL
... a vector drawing program, that IS what you wanted..... No? Try here: Virtual Etch-a-sketch (Flash required). Cheers.
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?>" > /> />
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd
<svg width="12cm" height="4cm" viewBox="0 0 1200 400"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
<rect x="1" y="1" width="1198" height="398"
fill="none" stroke="blue" stroke-width="2"
<circle cx="600" cy="200" r="100" fill="red" stroke="blue" stroke-width="10"
</svg>
Here's an interesting one too. Check out the export from Adobe Illustrator to Microsoft's Avalon/Vista format. The Eye Candy page is pretty cool. Amazing fidelity for a user interface technology. It's not SVG, but it's a very similar technology.
Adobe is buying Macromedia, might vanish.
Might? MIGHT????
Dude, FH has hada tube up its nose for years, and now that Adobe has it in its clutches, it's good as GONE. Which is a terrible shame, because I prefer FH to AI any day of the week. It was much more intuitive, and it had MULTIPLE PAGES (like DUH!) and was generally just a Better Application. What pissed me off with FH was it had a persistent memory leak in vers 9, 10, and MX, which they never properly fixed. But even with crashing twice a day, it was SO much easier to use.
AI has a long way to go to match FH, and now that FH is deader than a corporlite, they have no need to improve AI. I would expect AI to simply sit and suck for the rest of eternity until they finally roll it into Phootoshop 14 or whatever.
Time to go smoke some weed and look into those Freeware options...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I use OmniGraffle 3.0 for doing diagrams and charts. It works absolutely fantastic for that (once you figure out the somewhat strange shapes palette so you can import several thousand additional figures). It's easy to use and the output is beautiful, I love the nice vector shadows and such, they print out really nicely. I wouldn't use this app for designing logos or other artwork though, it's pretty much strictly a diagraming program, I suppose that's why it supports Visio file formats, but not Corel Draw formats.
BTW, Apple G5 and PowerBook G4 systems have shipped with OmniGraffle (and OmniOutliner plus some other third party software) for the past couple years, so you might already have it preinstalled (or at least available in the "additional software" bundle on the CD that shipped with your G5 or PowerBook).
If SVG gets more support and consequently, further developed for web use, it will be a kickarse format to work with.
Consider that when graphics are published as part of a layout on the web, a big variable that needs to be considered is resolution of users screen (and whether they're browsing with a maximised browser).
A good SVG toolkit with STANDARDISED browsers (yes, I'm talking to you, IE) will mean we can finally tag a div as width="80%", put an image in it as "100%", "100%" and forget about how the image renders based on resolution.
Of course, just because Firefox is supporting it, doesn't mean IE will follow suit. But we can all hope.
You got Macromedia Flash (vector movies), Freehand, but you left out Fireworks. Fireworks being Macromedia's (now Adobe) equivalent of Illustrator.
Ok... I can kind of understand why this could be helpful to someone looking for a vector drawing program for some purpose, but the programs on that list do such different things. CAD graphics are for one thing, vector illustration is another, graphing programs are yet another. Even included a vector animation program. Sure, they all use a particular method of calculating objects, but that's about it.
Can you imagine trying to do an ad layout with AutoCAD? How about trying to do animated web graphics with a graphic program.
This chart is pretty much useless, except for listing what standards formats each can handle.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Nice summary! What about Visio? I know it's got lots of other features, but it's also got some basics. (I haven't explored its export functionality). In the same vein - sad to say, I've often found myself using Word's 'Drawing Toolbar'. The UI's clunky and I wouldn't be surprised if exporting to other formats is not fun. Thoughts?
for slashdotting drunk at 2 am. Tsk tsk.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
I've googled for PS / EPS tutorials a few times and I either find really basic documentation or overly detailed low level documentation. I would like to know how to lay out a basic "newsletter" style document in PS.
I basiclly want to learn how to create a letter (or A4) sized self contained PS document that contains the following:
* Embedded EPS logo in the upper right hand corner
* Large typeface header text to the left of the logo
* A line across the page
* Date / Issue / etc information on one line of text across the page
* Another line across the page
* A bunch of text presented in three columns
* An embedded raster image somewhere in the text
Yeah, I know I'm far better off to use a real DTP program, or at least do this in TeX / LaTeX. But I think it's simple enough to where it shouldn't be too impossible to do with straight PS and some sort of way to embed the EPS and raster images.
Anyone have any pointers?
AutoCAD and Illustrator are for completely different audience. I get a lot of plots from Matlab; and Illustrator is a good package to make some touch up to the graphs. I would never use AutoCAD for that. But you really can't say which one is more powerful.
And where is XFig???
OmniGraffler has been around for a while on OS X and uses PDF drawing functionality that is accessible to OS X programmers. Its a good Vector based program. The developers are longtime developers on the OS X platform and have given the program a polished look and an intuitive feel. I rarely use Illustrator or Fireworks.
Saves in the PDF format which is nice because most Adobe products can handle PDF files.
-b
TGIF is a very nice vector drawing program. It is a very highly evolved version of xfig (but with better UI than xfig -- not gtk or qt though). It exports to a whole slew of vector formats -- my favourite being LaTeX and EPS. I don't leave home without it. ... Then again, I don't leave home much. :-p
Geometry drawingprogram.
m l
Very nice.
http://www.ofset.org/drgeo
This one is amazing too.
http://math.holycross.edu/~ahwang/current/ePiX.ht
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
I've always wondered why rendering of scalable icons isn't relegated to the font server. Seems to me that all the needed code is already there.
Not even funny anymore. Plus, you're over two weeks late, moron.
no text
Well, for chemistry vector graphics is the most natural format, so all the chemical drawing programs out there are in fact specialized vector drawing programs. As example I would mention BKchem (URL:http://bkchem.zirael.org/>) that uses SVG as its native format with private data embedded inside in a different namespace.
What about 'xfig'?
And going back a little further, 'macdraw'.
You missed karbon, part of koffice: http://koffice.kde.org/karbon.
There is a special consortium that enables various software vendors to use intelicad sources - IntelliCAD Technology Consortium ITC (http://www.intellicad.org/). Cadopia is only one of MANY (I mean more than 50) See http://www.intellicad.org/members/productlist.asp
Fireworks does vector and raster in one program very intuitively and is my number one tool for quick web mockups. Unfortunately, like Freehand, I fear that Adobe is going to do the death dance on it to make you buy their TWO ridculously overpriced and overpowered tools for this space. Which is very, very sad, since it is the only tool I know of that does all the things it does without a ton of extra fodderol you aren't going to use for web work and costing a bloody fortune.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Close enough for my purposes, creating maps in vector formats - QuickGrid.
i've had some good results with geogebra
http://www.geogebra.at:o)
my favorite one (still today...):
http://bourbon.usc.edu:8001/tgif/
and you did mention clones of xfig, but not the original:
http://www.xfig.org/
I find http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ works very well for converting black and white bitmaps to SVG or other vector formats.
Adama is a Cylon.
How about the one Nintendo's Virtual Boy used. Oh wait...you asked for GOOD ones. Sorry, my bad.
What I'm really after is an EPS to SVG converter so that I can use them with Apache's FOP tool.
Any suggestions?
Summation 2
Also there were previous slashdot stories about Pixar's in-house Sketch Review Tool, (a hybrid vector/raster tool) and Microsoft Acryllic.
I believe Studio Artist is primarily vector based.
There are also many vector programs for the sign/graphics industry to control CNC routers and plotters. FlexiSIGN is one of them.
Why is this flamebait, when the post above saying the same thing but with PostScript and cat was (4, Interesting)? Is it that you don't like SVG, or don't like Notepad, or are you all just on crack?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
and could you have written a less informative post?
;-) - yes he could have written a less informative post:
it is not a news source, it is a NewsSource[], where each element is a pointer (reference in post 1990's terms) to a news source, which is an informatve article.
The job of the post is to describe the contents of the news source, which it did quite accurately.
It is the job of coral cache, mirrordot and karma whores [and assholes like piquepaille] to mirror the content verbatim.
To answer your rhetorical question (every rhetorical question deserves an answer
He could have omitted the topic of the article, and the URL of the article, which would have been rather fun.
Ergo cogito sum a genius.
To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: digitize
(Can we have British English automated-human test images please, you insensitive clods!)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Inkscape
Sodipodi
daz
GraphViz which lets you draw graphs (has perl module too) in different formats including SVG. I believe I once saw a subroutine call tree drawn in it from perl profiler.
Have some respect for notepad you insensitive clod.
Not open or free, but Realdraw http://www.mediachance.com/realdraw/ is one of my favorite drawing tools. It's not as deep as AI or Freehand, and is probably closer to Fireworks in concept since it also does html slicing and bitmaps, but to get a design out quickly and intuitively it's one of the best.
It exports to SVG, and the author has a policy that you pay once and get upgrades for the life of the app.
If you thought Microsoft Acrylic was a good idea, but needed work, Realdraw is what it'll be like when it's finished. Fun too...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Artios and PackEge Both are pretty niche, basically only used for packaging cad and related prepress. But vector nonetheless.
And going back a little further, 'macdraw'.
MacDraw was neat, but most Mac users in 1984 were more comfortable in the raster world with MacPaint. Bezier curves scare most folks! Still neat to work with EPS files on a Mac 512K.
Did you know that MacDraw/ClarisDraw has inspired a Mac OS X version? EazyDraw It's a bit weird but the price is right.
It is by far the worst product Microsoft has ever made that I've had the honor of pooping on... And I've had lots of honors...
what's a snape? what's a dumbledore? i don't get it.
1. Photoshop
2. Paint Shop Pro.
While both of these are better known as Raster tools they actually do as much if not more in dealing with Vector images.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
On the topic of graphics/vectors - does anyone have an idea of what program magazines like Economist and papers like USA Today use to create their graphs? I can never manage to get things looking that crisp in any program. Suggestions would be very appreciated.
I'm surprised you didn't list xfig, despite listing a port and a clone (and noting they were related to it).
I often use xfig to draw simple figures for latex documents that I write... I've always found the interface quite awkward to use, though. .fig files are also a bit restricted, but conveniently they're often easy to edit by hand.
http://www.reportlab.org/
Uses OO python, brilliant and easy to use. I've used it to draw all kinds of publication quality figures, including genetic plasmid maps (I'm into bacterial genomics).
So far, I have not found anything it cannot do that I need, and it is cheaper than Illustrator. It's intuitive, stable, and powerful. I'm constantly surprised it doesn't get more attention.
You probably haven't seen it mentioned because it's one of those listed in TFA. Which, you know, might be worth R-ing before you post. :)
So is Firefox Mozilla's version of Internet Explorer or Mosaic?
The truth is FreeHand and Illustrator are VERY different programs, their even for different things, SHOCK!
I use FreeHand almost every day, I used to use Illustrator but I found FreeHand is a much better tool at a better price, tho learning to use it was considerably harder than Illustrator.
Also the FreeHand project started in 1988 which is plenty long enough ago to consider it a different product than Illustrator.
Sure we can go back and forth over which product is better but why bother?
I'd rather design a logo in Illustrator and I'd rather design a poster with that logo in FreeHand.
You get down on the GP for being a moron who took 2 weeks to read a simple book that should have taken only 5-8 hours assuming that the GP was even a decent reader.
Has it dawned on you that maybe the reader is a moron? Likewise, I would have to call you a CLOD, for getting after the moron.
Skencil (was called Sketch) is a good basic editor that has been stable for a long time. It's particularly interesting to people making diagrams for LaTeX, because of the SketchLatex and skLatex plugins to handle latex math formatting visually within the editor.
Also, there is IPE and XFig should at least rate a mention.
Smart Draw is simply wonderful, good UI, really complete and the price is right.
Ok, it is more about diagrams and maps than about painting, but it's a time saver
Try a demo and see for yourself.
Xara X is very good.. .. Just thought i would mention it cause no one here seems to know it or use it...
There's a similar list of editors at the Vector Graphics Foundry at SourceForge. My favorite for advanced diagramming is TGIF. For more simple stuff I usually use OpenOffice Draw (or a white board and a digital camera ;-)
My other sig is clever and funny
Somebody asked this question a few years ago on slashdot in a more 3-D context, and one person heartily recommended SketchUp. They've got a free download.
I checked it out, and have been a happy customer every since. They've got both MacOS X and Windows versions, and it really kicks ass - it's the only vector drawing program that I've used where I feel happy to just doodle and something interesting tends to evolve. It's that good of a tool, that it naturally extends your imagination. Of course, because of the nature of the tool the drawings always tend to grow into the third dimension - which always gives a more dynamic result.
I'm just a happy SketchUp customer. Check it out, it's really a great tool.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
You missed iText.e nt/index.html), or translate operations on a java.awt.Graphics2D object to PDF operators and operands automatically (http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/directconte nt/graphics2D/).
You can write PDF syntax by using some Java methods (http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/directcont
The guy in the sixth sense is dead.
To construct a few of the diagrams in my thesis, I wrote a program that outputted SVG, which I then loaded into inkscape to add a few labels and the like. It's very, very straightforward to visualize scientific data in this way, easier than doing bitmaps in many cases.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Let's not be so negative. I think Adobe will incorporate a lot of the features you and others loved so much about FH into AI.
I used to use both AI and FH all of the time. They're both vector drawing programs with comparable features and have both been in development for a long time. The concepts are the same, you just have to learn a new interface. You've already done the hard part (learning the concepts). FH is intuitive cuz you know it better. Don't even try to tell me that the freeware apps are even close to either AI or FH. If there is one, I'll drop FH and AI instantly.
Sidenote: I don't know if I can consider a program that crashes twice a day a "better application".
Sure mate, whatever... Yeah as far as programs go I'd say Firefox is Mozilla's version of Microsoft's IE... that's a pretty accurate parallel. Both are their respective companies web browsing applications, likewise FH and Illustrator are their respective companies vector drawing applications... I've been using Freehand since it was made by Aldus, so I know it's history pretty well thanks, and I too use both FH and Illustrator every day, so know their respective differences. Maybe you thought I was saying that FH was an Illustrator clone? (YOUR mistake). I prefer FH very much over Illustrator, and likewise I love Fireworks. What are you on, and can I have some?
... from the world of TeX. They can be used to program diagrams, not just glyphs in a font. Maybe the same can be said of fontforge??
There's also the pic preprocessor for troff.
There was something called tgif from UCLA (IIRC).
TeXdraw was a nice macro package to achieve vectorized Postscript drawings within TeX.
This list is NOT comprehensive, even of what is on Freshmeat (which, in turn, is not comprehensive in what is Open Source, which in turn is not comprehensive in what exists) but it should make for a good start.
Oh, and this list was trivial to make. Once you have such a list, it is then easy to go out and try the software to see if it'll do what you want. According to the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, "it is a mistake, often made, to theorize without data". So, when you theorize as to what software you'd like to use, here is some data you can use.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I really like inkscape. I've worked with it a fair bit now, and with the exception of a standard icon library for creating network etc diagrams, it's really good.
You can't win a fight.
How about FOP?
FOP FAQ
BugBear
Ignorance is curable. Stupid is forever.
Amaya is the advanced Web editor of the W3C. It's not really production-ready, it's a kind of technology testbed. It supports the whole XHTML family, and XML languages like MathML and SVG.
This post is displayed with recycled electrons
No mention of The TAB, which is a Flash-like program actually focused on art and animation, instead of application development.
http://www.the-tab.com/index.htm
I think it is fantastic!
TFA says QCad is $28 but it is free (and Free) for the *nix versions.
And maybe it isn't totally intuitive but it is easy to learn. I give it a thumbs up anyway.
zoner draw http://www.zoner.com/?? DrawPlus from serif software for FREE (registration required, of course) http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/
Juno-2 is something different. It's a dual-view (picture/program) drawing editor based on a constraint solver.
It was programmed in the Modula-3 programming language, which failed to achieve critical mass (despite there being a company by that name commercializing it at one time).
It's from Digital/DEC (now Compaq or HP) Systems Research Center (SRC), the same place that gave us the original LaTeX.
but I haven't seen Gimp mentioned yet - it'll do basic svg stuff
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Please take note that while Microsoft Acrylic is available for download as 180-day beta testing, the previous version of Acrylic - the Expression 3.3 Preview is actually free without any time limit AND is also available for Mac OS X.
It also runs well with WINE under Linux.
The info page for Expression at Wikipedia gives more detail on resources and tutorials for the powerful yet under-appreciated illustration package.
EVE (http://www.goosee.com/goosee/index.shtml) is a very small (74kB) vector graphics editor. The web edition, which is now free, exports SVG. It is surprisingly powerful, considering the program size.
Former JASC WebDraw, two-way-tool (source and graphic views on SVG).
Just realized that, as it's not on their webpage anymore. Are they nuts???
Webdraw was GOOD.
ArtWorks II should have been in that list. One of the best vector drawing programs around with nice export features including SVG. Two other omissions:
the vector backbone of Risc Os: Acorn Draw(+), originally developed by Sophie Wilson and OakDraw on the PC that can import Acorn Draw files and has SVG export as well.
ah! i remember back in my school, which had for some reason at the time decided to stick with Acorn (RISC OS) computers, the most common drawing tool on the system was one called 'draw'.
this was a vector program. it seemed to take pride of place over any raster progs...
whatever happened? vector programs are so much more useful for some things, and yet they seem almost non-existent...
should've been a vector equivalent of paint with windows.
Does anyone know of a good easy to use one? I've never user any CAD program before but I have some spare time and well, got a few projects that would benefit from using a CAD program to atleast do some form of prototyping.
:)
* must work with freebsd
** just out of curiousity, is it a good idea to import it after in to say Blender?
You forgot to mention a whole category of vector based software, that of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). All of ESRI's ARC products and other GIS programs are all capable of reading and saving to various vector formats, including .eps and .ai types. I wish tools like MapQuest would have thought about publishing their maps as vectors, this would have made them look so much better when printed.
VectorWorks http://www.nemetschek.net/ ArchiCAD http://www.graphisoft.com/products/archicad/ And I'm sure I could find many others...
Canvas always was one of computer graphics' best kept secrets.
In what seems like another lifetime I started a software distribution business which introduced desktop publishing to Australia and which I see is still operating, albeit under a newly revised name.
Of all the products I was involved in sourcing, Canvas still features on Pica's front page in what must be some kind of a record for an international software distribution arrangement.
Deneba drew me to Miami a few times in the early days of the arrangement, none more memorable than when I had to leave a rental car in a no stopping area at Gatwick and still missed my flight to New York, but managed to switch to one 15 minutes later to Dallas which flew over Greenland where the clouds below cleared revealing a spectacular view, which put the need to reverse the order of my scheduled one day visits to Miami and New York into perspective.
It might have been another Miami visit when I first saw GhostScript.
Now I just can't wait for SVG in DOM so plans that have been brewing through 20 years of PostScript might finally find the platform they need.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
For those of you who have not noticed, the URL cited in this comment maxes my CPU. While I realize that I am using an older legacy browser (Netscape 4.79) -- this is because I consider security through obscurity to be a reasonable path. This is a classic example IMO of people citing URLs where they have no idea *what* kind of code may end up being executed on their machine. (And this is with Java & Javascript disabled!)
Every time someone says "does nobody use Freshmeat" and lists the dump of some keyword search, they completely miss the point of asking the question on Slashdot. Rather than have thousands of people having to individually try a looong list of possibly buggy and obsolete software, collectively putting together reviews of the applications each person has used in one place can pull together a very good overview of which apps are best and should be used for what. The idea is to eliminate wasted effort, not boost it. Not that we don't appreciate you taking the time to post all those programs ;-), just that most of us have tried Freshmeat but don't have time to try every single application in the hope it's the one we need.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Did I miss any good ones? I'm reminded of Turtle Logo. It was the apex of vector drawing in 1981. Go, Apple II! :-)
Peter Jipsen's ASCIIsvg script (JavaScript) is an easy and quite powerful way to generate mathematical SVG graphics in HTML.
If God manifested Himself to us here He would do so in the form of a spraycan advertised on TV. -- Philip K. Dick
I have been searching for SVG-Tiny compatible software (neither Inkscape, corelDraw, Illustrator, Freehand, Flash or any of the other major packages support SVG-Tiny) for a while and found the following two:
Beatware - http://www.beatware.com/products/md.html
Ikivo Animator - http://ikivo.com/
I don't think Beatware is quite up-to-beat, but it has some nice SVG profiling features (SVG-Tiny 1.0, 1.1, 1.1+ etc.)
I would LOVE for SVG-Tiny to appear in Inkscape as it is well on its way to beat the commercial packages.
Just to indicate, the currently in beta, Omnigraffle 4 will support exprting to SVG.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
For what it's worth Acrylic has one L .
We have a site license for Microsoft Visio too. It can do the job, but the lack of hotkeys for some common things is annoying (I recall Send to Back, Bring to Front being buried in pulldown menus). Visio is supported by Crossover office.
http://www.laszlosystems.com/ http://www.openlaszlo.com/
Your article inspired me to write my own inspired review of drawing software:
Dia -- May be an abbreviation of "Diagram" (?)
Inkscape -- I prefer Xara X.
jFig -- I don't like figs (or prunes).
I understand this article is probably geared toward poor mathematics students, but come on. If you're going to go through the bother of "researching" and listing products students probably can't afford anyway you may as well say something useful -- or at least remotely objective -- about each piece of software.
Better still, don't bother listing commercial software at all and stick to the open source propaganda if Slashdot is where you're posting this stuff (I have a hard time seeing why you did, by the bye, to be blunt about it).
PowerPoint?
(ducks)
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.)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I suppose a number of posts about software titles missing from the list are inevitable, especially since the list could be enormous once one includes the bevy of CAD and 3D apps. While most of these are ill-suited for casual use, there is one missing title that has broad application: Canvas, which is now is owned by ACD Systems.
Canvas is capable of both vector and raster editing. I would say it's most comparable to CorelDRAW!, but it's clearly superior in many regards (such as the optional GIS and Scientific Imaging modules that ACD Systems added). It's available for Win32 and OSX. Canvas X is the current major version. The US$350 price quoted on the site is for the Professional version; the GIS and Scientifc Imaging modules cost an additional $200-300.
Yep, you missed ACD Canvas, formerly Deneba Canvas. Best commercial vector-drawing program I've seen. http://www.acdsystems.com/
Canvas (by Deneba). This commercial illustration software blows the doors off Adobe Illustrator.
LaTeX's output is phenomenal (you can always tell a Word document from LaTeX output pretty easily), but the syntax really sucks.
One thing that might help would be better perl-style error reporting, but it's just very nasty to do some things...start creating a complex document and you figure out that various packages do not interact all that well (well, *this* table package can do foo, and *this* table package can do bar, but....). There have been a bunch of times that I know *what* I want to do, but not *how* to do it.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Yeah, but does it run Lin.... oh... whaa?
It renders 3d models and artwork to SVG in versions 4 and newer.
Since this is a math guy, he might want to look at using Python (or other language) to generate SVG files. I've been doing this lately and it works nice and can be displayed/printed with Inkscape and a little Javascript allows animation in the Alpha release of Firefox 1.5.
Also very interesting is the correlation between SVG paths and CNC tool paths, but I have yet to build or buy a CNC.
What about Blender? Technically it is a 3d program, but it does have Bezier curves. Does that count?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
http://sketchup.com/ is a really amazing 3D design tool.
For a long time I was looking at various free or demo CAD programs to do quick floorplans and renovation ideas. But what I really wanted was a 3D sketch tool that would show me the measurements etc.
SketchUp is that tool, and it's great. Evidently it can export to regular CAD programs so you can generate blueprints, etc., and also can export vector graphics.
file://%windir%/System32/notepad.exe
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did.
What better use for vector graphics than mapping fantasy worlds?
http://www.profantasy.com/
also mention metapost, PyX, Asymptote, GRI, ...
AccountKiller
Actually, YOUR post is the least informative. If you don't have anything positive, keep silent. I for one found his post useful.
It shouldn't be too hard to get your hands on a few Unix-y command line utilities like ps2pdf and ps2epsi and psmerge and the like. You might also look at 'tracing' tools such as 'potrace' which will take a bitmap file, trace the edges of shapes, and output vector graphics (in any one of several fun formats). They're limited, but useful.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I've been using Linux for a few years now, mainly for scientific work. I've always found superb software tools for most of my needs, except vector drawing.
Yes, there are numerous vector drawing programs out there; some are reasonnably good, some aren't, but I can't understand why there's still no "GIMP" of vector drawing yet. Vector drawing is vital for most scientific work -- it's essential for producing clean, top quality schematics.
Inkscape and Sodipodi are very promising but not quite there (I didn't try the latest version yet, but using Inkscape 0.41, trying to draw a few arrows with nondefault size and colors was a frustrating experience). I understand that their respective goals are not to be professional technical drawing programs, but an artistic tool and an complete SVG editor; yet they are on their way to be the best solution available.
Currently, OpenOffice Draw is, sadly, one of the most usable vector drawing program available on Linux, despite an horrible color management system and a limited set of tools.
I got a poster done using the marvelous Scribus software, but it's more a page editing software than a vector drawing one. However, it is one of the only OSS software able to import EPS and PDF's . The lack of this feature in most Linux drawing program intrigues me: it has always been easy to print and convert PS and EPS files in Linux, but almost impossible to actually edit them.
I hope I'm not sounding too harsh, but creating quality vector graphics has been a hassle for too long. I really hope that Inkscape and other project really take off soon.
dot maybe?
It seems like the real promise of SVG natively on Firefox is the opportunity to have a web-based drawing program using javascript and the DOM. Does anyone know of any or are any in the works?
If you've got old scientific code lying around, one of the older output formats from these programs (maybe vector) was the Hewlet Packard Graphics Language (HPGL), which was/is used to drive plotters. Canvas was the only graphics package I found that would open HPGL files. I used Canvas to make a great figure for a paper.
This seemed to be a project to watch a few years ago. But it still has major missing features / problems and does not seem to been worked on in the last year. Has anyone forked it?
http://www.scilab.org/
Microsoft Acrylic is listed as free; it is not. Is a trailware (currently a beta).
I'm surprised you didn't mention it. It's pretty nice.
Dia's not terrible, especially for free software. However, its UML support isn't great, there is no support for DFDs, and the printing/exporting capabilities are lacking.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I agree Vector graphics are fun. I'm learning some of the new features of Google maps API beta. You can use latitude and longitude coordinates to draw. It's been a very long time since I've messed with vector graphics too. I remember a vector drawing program called from middle school (I think it was called Turtle). Any way here is an example of my initials using vector graphics with gmaps new API.
http://www.houstonworks.com/shaun/gmaps/small.cfm
TODO create witty sig.
i mean, WHO CARES about the 29 vector drawing programs ??!?! BAH!!!!!
(Yes the article did mention it.) It's the best thing since CorelDraw and happens to be free, cross-platform, and uses pure standards-compliant SVG. And does alpha very well - something Corel didn't do in the early days.
I still have to use Dia sometimes though for more structured drawings. Somebody ought to work on building something like Visio but using Inkscape as a basis. The programs probably shouldn't be merged, because they are for different kinds of drawings; but the Dia/Visio thing should have all the power of Inkscape and add draggable templates, smart connectors etc.
The second most important thing to me in a drawing program, and only just behind the usability of the package, is how transparent the file format is.
This is important because 10 years from now, when I've moved jobs, am working in a vastly different OS, have backed up my drawings through N generations of media, I probably won't have access to the original code which created a drawing which I'd like to view, print, etc. If the basic underlying representation is a commonly used format, there's a much better chance of at least viewing the electronic files. If the underlying representation is in some unique format (doesn't have to be proprietary or closed) that nothing else reads, I might as well try to recreate the drawing from scratch in a different tool.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Ah yes, VRML. I remember when I first installed a VRML viewer plugin in netscape 3.0 GOLD (!!!) edition, so I could see what the fuss was about. I went into this virtual city with ads everywhere, everything you clicked on brought you to some other page. I thought to myself "So this is the future!"
While most of these are ill-suited for casual use, there is one missing title that has broad application: Canvas [acdsystems.com], which is now is owned by ACD Systems [acdsystems.com].
Did ACD buy Deneba or just Canvas, do you know? Is it really good for casual usage? Though I haven't really tried it yet I've got Canvas 7, as freeware/trialware. I wonder how it is for editing photographs. Actually I'd like to get something with the capabilities of Photoshop without the price tag.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Another geometrical tool, it isn't capable to manage svg images, but it's like your first option Cinderella.
i /index.htm
http://www.cabri.com/v2/pages/en/index.php
You can find a Cabri Laboratory (spanish) here:
http://www.personal.us.es/rbarroso/trianguloscabr
I can't remember - didn't MacDraw support SVG? ;) It was definitely vector at any rate.... /me tries installing MacDraw for MacOS 7.1 on his dual G5 to no avail...
digital artist, 3D animator, web designer, and otherwise technological creative type....
One of my favorite things about xfig is the ability to embed LaTeX commands in the figure and have them rendered by LaTeX. This is nice because it gives font consistancy between the document text and the fonts in the figure. With the figtex2eps script, one can process their .fig files by latex and have a .eps file for direct inclusion into the document.
-- john
A couple of other folks have already mentioned Canvas which is a great program that never seemed to get the attention and wider audience it deserves.
Another great vector program is the CAD program Microstation but that is a high-end app that is probably outside the intent of your list (and right-offhand I don't know if it spits out SVG files).
Does anyone have any tips for creating vector graphics using PHP? Specifically, I need to take text input and a selected font and return a vector file, then, ideally, be able to merge other vector files with it.
I'm currently using the GDLib to create a raster image but our art guys still have to re-create the image in illustrator for use in production.
I would be a hero around here if I could create vector on the fly.
Shane
NOOOO! You bitch! You bitch!
PostScript is more of a programming language for printers than it is a markup or typesetting language. I mean, it includes loops and the ability to create abstract data types. For typesetting, it gives you the tools to tell the printer how to do most everything that it can do, for setting transformations, for drawing primitives, and for placing letters and text.
And nothing else.
I recently finished a DB Design course and depended on Smartdraw 7. It allowed me to work much quicker then with Visio and I like it's DFD support better. You can download the eval version from http://www.smartdraw.com/.
Most programs generate horribly unreadible Postscript. Trying to learn PS by looking at the output of Word or OpenOffice would be like trying to learn C by reading the results of the International Obfuscated C Coding Contest.......
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I cannot believe my luck. Please, slashdot my auction for the SVG Essentials book. Also be sure to look at my auctions for other books on the cheap!
Surprised that no one mentioned Auto-Illustrator. This one-won honorable mention at a Prix Ars Electonica. It's a vector-based app that does away with the normal method operation (crossing t's and dotting i's), and focuses on capturing expressiveness of gesture and compound user actions.
Too bad it's slower than dialup, these days. Not to mention that it cost 100+. I should have spent my money on chewing gum, considering 1.2 was probably the last update.
NB: the demo/serialization scheme on Auto-Illustrator is very unique. As time flounders forward past the demo date, AI develops more and more of an artistic liscence on your open docs.
I would recommend looking at something called Quikscript. This is a very ingenious pure Postscript markup language. It is essentially a complex Postscript header that defines some useful tags, in a primitive HTML sort of way. And the beauty is that there is no executable. All you need is a text editor and your printer (or ghotscript) does all the heavy lifting.
http://www.smartdraw.com/ It's been around forever and you can download a free trial.
So is Firefox Mozilla's version of Internet Explorer or Mosaic?
.....I just figured out that you're a kid...nevermind
Yes
The truth is FreeHand and Illustrator are VERY different programs, their even for different things, SHOCK!
Although FreeHand and Illustrator are similar programs, no one has said they were the same program or that they did the same things.....this really isn't shocking to much of anyone.
I use FreeHand almost every day, I used to use Illustrator but I found FreeHand is a much better tool at a better price, tho learning to use it was considerably harder than Illustrator.
You may like doodling with expensive software, but it is clear you have not yet learnt either program.
Also the FreeHand project started in 1988 which is plenty long enough ago to consider it a different product than Illustrator.
again, no one said they were the same program
Sure we can go back and forth over which product is better but why bother?
um...you're the only one who said....oh jeez forget it
I've tried Expression, Canvas, Flash, and Freehand. I stick with Illustrator. I enjoyed playing with Expression's natural-media tools, but as a Mac owner, I'll probably never see another version now that MS ate it, and I don't want to find myself depending on an orphaned app...
egypt urnash minimal art.
One fairly nice, inexpensive program you missed is Autocad's Autosketch. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID= 123112&id=2753027
An excellent replacement for AutoCAD. Can be used to develop your own software and comes with a free excellent drawing editor. http://www.kolba.com/vecad.htm
That's very neat. Don't suppose you'd have a handy mod to make it display a page number as a fraction of the total number of pages at the top right-hand corner of every page, e.g. "Page 1/9" on page 1, "Page 2/9" on page 2, etc? That would top it off.
I'm a Dapper Dan man.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
Army Research Labs offers a tool that is primarily using Construtive Solid Geometry(CSG), but has a lot of vector components to it. The tool is free at arl.mil and last I checked you can get the source and indefinite support for $500.
Paint.NET is a very nice PhotoShop-like open source graphics program.
/ 225514.aspx
r aphic-Editors/Paint-NET.shtml
Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems.
http://blogs.msdn.com/rickbrew/archive/2004/09/03
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/G
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another