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29 Vector Drawing Programs

Posted by timothy on from the drawling-lahns dept.

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?"

8 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. Missed TGIF by saikatguha266 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

  2. Re:A *good* PS / EPS tutorial somewhere? by josh42 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Short answer: It's more complex than you think.

    To PostScript, a letter/word/line is just another shape that can be put on the page. You'd need to break lines manually, control line spacing yourself, etc. Want it justified? Forget it.

    You'd be much better off using (La)TeX for this sort of thing.

  3. A few of these should be counted . . . by Brendor · · Score: 4, Informative
    Alias Maya has a great vector renderer. It outputs decent AI/EPS files as well as .swf files.

    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.

  4. Re:SVG Icons by akzeac · · Score: 2, Informative

    AFAIK they are optimized directly for font rendering (black/white or black with grey tones), while SVG requires colors, gradients, multiple transparencies, textures and so on.

  5. Metafont (mf) and MetaPost (mpost)... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    ... 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.

  6. Does nobody here use Freshmeat? by jd · · Score: 5, Informative
    Some of these are probably listed elsewhere, but many aren't (as of the time of this posting) and it's good to have them collected in one place, anyway.

    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)
    1. Re:Does nobody here use Freshmeat? by Bazzargh · · Score: 2, Informative

      Use Inkscape rather than potrace directly - you get all the potrace goodness, plus you can edit the results. very nifty.
      http://www.inkscape.org/doc/tracing/tutorial-traci ng.html

  7. QCad by smugfunt · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.