Links
Here are some links to other programs useful, in one way or another, for desktop publishing sorts of tasks. The Inkscape and Scribus sites in particular both have many useful links to such things, and lively and informative discussion lists and wikis.Indispensible Artsy Software | ||
| The Gimp | www.gimp.org | |
| Mypaint Amazing software for drawing | mypaint.intilinux.com | |
| Inkscape | www.inkscape.org | |
| Imagemagick Utilities | www.imagemagick.org | |
The Big Bucks | ||
| Adobe InDesign | www.adobe.com/products/indesign/ | |
| Adobe Pagemaker | www.adobe.com/products/pagemaker/ | |
| Adobe Freehand (formerly Macromedia Freehand, formerly Aldus) Development has been abandonded | www.adobe.com/products/freehand | |
| So-Far-Not-Adobe QuarkXPress | www.quark.com/products/xpress/ | |
| Ovation Pro | pilling.users.netlink.co.uk/ovationpro.html | |
The Small Bucks | ||
|
PageStream Has existed since 1985, runs on even Amigas and Atari!! | pagestream.org | |
| Xara Xtreme Vector graphics. It appears they gave up on the free Linux port! | www.xara.com | |
The Bucks Stop HereIn addition to the Indispensible stuff above: | |||
| TeX/LaTeX The quintessential, very powerful layout engine. Works from text configuration files. | www.tug.org | ||
| Scribus Capable DTP, though a bit slow for large, image heavy documents. Extensive PDF abilities. In terms of functionality, what's missing is impositioning. | www.scribus.net | ||
| Krita A bitmap image editor, roughly in the same category as the Gimp. Krita is notable in that it can already do 16 bit images, unlike the Gimp where 16bit editing has been just around the corner for many, many years. Krita's stated focus is more on painting, and the Gimp is more for photo manipulation. | www.koffice.org/krita | ||
| Podofo A set of tools to help process PDF files. Podofoimpose, for instance, imposes PDF documents using a plan file based on a minimal lua based syntax. There is also Podofobrowser, which is a great low level browser of the contents of PDF files. | podofo.sourceforge.net | ||
| Lyx Kind of a graphical front end for TeX/LaTeX | www.lyx.org | ||
| OpenOffice.org The Writer component is basically just a word processor, but frequently useful, especially for dealing with MS Word documents. | openoffice.org | ||
| LibreOffice Forked from Openoffice in 2010. | www.libreoffice.org | ||
| Kword Easy word processor, MUCH smaller than Openoffice. | www.koffice.org/kword | ||
| Passepartout (pronounced pus-par-too) Exemplary straightforward gui for simple wrapped text and images. Very simple and easy file format. Has phenomenal, unmatched "Inspiration" button. It is very important for software to inspire the proper work ethic, and the Inspiration option does that admirably. | www.stacken.kth.se/project/pptout | ||
| Psutils Command line utilities to perform various things like booklet impositioning on postscript files | www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~ajcd/psutils/index.html | ||
| Formatpixel Webtop publishing, if you can believe it! The free version gives you 512k and 1 project space. It lets you lay out your own little zine booklet or pamphlet. You can subscribe to have multiple projects and more storage space. Haven't used it, but it sure looks pretty neat! | formatpixel.com | ||
Other Links
You might check out Libre Graphics World, which keeps tabs on the latest in open source graphics software. Also watch out for the annual Libre Graphics Meeting, which brings together users and devolopers from all over the world to hash out what's happening and what's going to happen in the field.Here are lots of links for Linux based artists, compiled by Tom Lechner:
www.tomlechner.com/computer
Here are lots of links from the Laxkit for various specifications and programming libraries:
laxkit.sourceforge.net/links.html
Here's lots of links to various art related software in an Ubuntu forum. The software listed there have been placed into this wiki (artlinux.wetpaint.com), maybe it's just me, but that wiki seems a bit slow (and requires cookies just to open the page for viewing?!).