Alternatives To Adobe's Creative Suite?

jsepeta writes "I've been using Adobe products for years, and own several older versions of the products from their Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Acrobat Pro, and Dreamweaver. I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market. But I can't seem to locate software for graphic design and printing that outputs CMYK files that printing companies will accept. And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design. Any suggestions? Our company is notoriously frugal and would certainly entertain the idea of using open source products if we could implement them in a way that doesn't infringe upon our Microsoft-centric hegemony / daily work tasks in XP."

Comments

Re:Best replacements for Dreamweaver

[batwingTM]

I teach Website Development at a TAFE and I have found Notpad++ to be pretty good. It is still a simple text editor, but it's free and it colour-codes your text (useful for finding those unclosed tags or quotation marks).

Dreamweaver does more, but it depends greatly what you are doing. I use Dreamweaver a lot, but I spend nearly all my time in code view anyway. The only major problem I have with Dreamweaver is it's inability to handle frames properly. but frankly, no WYSIWYG editor does. You're better off setting frames and framesets in text editors anyway, if you are using them at all.

Many polished alternatives for the Mac

[47Ronin]

At least for mac users, there are quite a few very well designed and maintained products that are shareware and rival Adobe's offerings in both features and pizazz.

RapidWeaver is an industrial-strength alternative to Dreamweaver which includes an SDK, full drag-n-drop designing interface, coding panel, Flash integration, and site maintenance. Currently it's $49.

Coda is the newcomer on the block, built by one of the best Mac shareware coding companies. As with the others, it allows for drag-n-drop designing and fully supports XHTML. Panic Software's tagline "shockingly good Mac software" is evident here cause they integrate the features of Transmit (their excellent FTP utility) including site/filepath synchronization, drag-n-drop uploading from the Dock... Coda also includes a console that's integrated into the app window that allows for split terminal shells for SSH and other functions. Coda includes a GUI CSS editor and comprehensive HTML programmer's guide in the application itself. $79.

TextMate is the Mac's premiere enterprise-level, yet shareware price text editor that does... pretty much anything. It can handle just about as many language bundles as jEdit but is purely Mac. It integrates well with Transmit, the shell, Subversion, and has a fully customizable code snippet library for full programmer control. I can't even begin to summarize all the features that sets this editor apart from the others, but it easily shames Dreamweaver's code window. Just watch the screencasts on the website. It costs 39.

CSSEdit by MacRabbit is a GUI-powered CSS editor which has a snooping mode called X-Ray that can analyze a website's design similar to Firefox's 3rd party Web Developer addon, except with style, polish, and features that you've come to expect from Mac applications. It includes a CSS "builder" workflow that allows you to use some natural language and object-oriented programming (in the most basic sense) to build CSS effects. $29.95

There are many others including Apple's own iWeb (which is included with every new Macintosh, is VERY easy to use, and puts out bloated-yet XHTML compliant code) and BBEdit by Bare Bones Software which is very comparable to TextMate in many ways.

Re:Scribus

[o'reor]

I would put it maybe on par with MS Publisher

Uuuuh, can't let you say that. It *is* way more powerful than MS Publisher. The problem is that it has a complex user interface, quite difficult to master, and requires an advanced understanding of color profiles (ICC) to set up the pre-press capabilities properly, and to produce X-PDF files.

But if I were a publisher who did not have $2500 to spare every 4 years for a new QuarkXPress license, I would certainly give Scribus a try.

Re:Well...

[suv4x4]

What's even funnier is the poster who declares that others have never designed professionally, while never posting a link to their own portfolio. For all we know, your sum total of graphics design experience involves crayons and construction paper.

- sincerely, a professional designer who uses all FOSS tools, and kicks your butt at it.

1. Bitching about me not posting portfolio examples for some reason, while you yourself not posting any portfolio too: -2 points.
2. Posting as Anonymous Coward while bitching about above point: -10 points.
3. Claiming your kick my ass in design without knowing what I do, and without me knowing what you do: -25 points.
4. Posting links, the majority of which are about people who moved to Linux, and not about people who moved to GIMP: -50 points.
5. Comparing dust removes and wire removal on CinePaint, with original design on a full-blown raster editor: -1000 points.
6. Citing the CinePaint project manager as a reliable source about how many people use CinePaint versus other tools: -2000 points. Did you know Adobe also claims "Photoshop is the most used application in the motion picture industry"? But wait, one of your links says CinePaint has got Scooby Doo covered, that's impressive by itself.

Re:Well...

[Ankh]

Luckily GIMP can do rounded rectangles out of the box.

I still wouldn't recommend GIMP for replacing PhotoShop directly in an existing Apple + Adobe + PostScript/EPS/PDF workflow, because of the lack of CMYK support, and the difficulties of working in the RGB colourspace, which doesn't have a clear enough overlap with the CMYK colourspace, and the lack of gamut warnings (visible indication that you've used colours that can't be printed). This stuff needs to happen in the editing interface - to the person who said, isn't it like the sound system compensating for a listening room, no, it's more like the recording engineer noticing when the needles are stuck all the way at 10 (max level) and detail is getting lost. You can't add detail back later.

Inkscape and sk1 are both being used as vector-based software in pre-press (sk1 was designed for that) but overall the Free Software graphic design workflow is not yet very mature. Part of that is that the commercial works has been responsive overall to designer's needs, and part of it is that designers are only very rarely programmers, and programmers only rarely get involved in graphic design enough to understand why OpenOffice + GIMP isn't a total solution.

People have been working on improving the situation - e.g. the organisers and participants at the Libre Graphics Meeting. Scribus is indeed advancing rapidly, with a lot of momentum, although its text handling in some ways still lags behind very early versions of Quark, and as it stands today it's not going to challenge people who have come to rely on the newer features of InDesign. But really, it's early days yet. We're in some ways not quite where the proprietary world was in the late 1980s, and in other ways we're ahead of the proprietary world, but we have to catch up in some of the places where we're behind.

It's no good asking to use software they have no real hope themselves of modifying or enhancing, and saying, use this, and if it doesn't work for you, just add features, and by the way it doesn't do everything that right now you believe you need, because it's as much use as handing a person with no legs who needs to get somewhere a broken bicycle. This is not to say I don't believe in Free Software. I just recognise that we don't yet have a Free solution to everyone's needs yet.