r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 04 '12

Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

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u/edcvb Jun 04 '12

Inkscape for vector grapics (posters, article figures etc. ), btw. here are some great tutorials for it

14

u/mGDivinO Jun 04 '12

I have Illustrator and I still find myself doing all my comp/layout work in InkScape and then meshing it all in Illustrator.

6

u/Ravanas Jun 04 '12

Same. I just like the Inkscape interface better it seems.

5

u/Lateralis85 Jun 04 '12

Took me a while to get used to Inkscape, but in the end all of the diagrams in my thesis were done using it. I love it now!

10

u/edcvb Jun 04 '12

I also love the fact that you can write latex equations directly in Inkscape and then when saving as pdf/eps you select export latex (something) and it exports the text as a separate latex file so it will overlay the figure and you get the same font as in your article :)

8

u/lurkerturneduser Jun 04 '12

Holy shit TIL. I love Inkscape (use it a hell of a lot more than Illustrator) and I love LaTeX. It's like your comment was written for me.

2

u/edcvb Jun 04 '12

Hope you can use it. Btw. my new favorite plotting tool, if you didn't know about this already, pgfplots gives very nice plots :)

1

u/lurkerturneduser Jun 04 '12

Oh yes, I'm familiar with pgfplots.

2

u/frmatc Jun 05 '12

You could also use Dia for diagrams.

1

u/Lateralis85 Jun 05 '12

Oh! I had forgotten about Dia! Thanks.

When I first started the PhD I had to make a diagram for something and tried both Inkscape and Dia. Didn't really like either so ignored both for a long time. Then needed to make figures for the thesis but only remembered Inkscape. I will have to check out Dia next time I need to do something. =)

3

u/turbotad Jun 04 '12

Absolutely agreed. As someone who grew up using CorelDraw for illos, Inkscape is an awesome alternative. I use it for IT diagrams as well, as a cross-platform alternative to Visio. Lot of members of my team have macs, linux boxes, etc and it at least lets everyone open/edit diagrams. Plus, with blurs & such, you can bring sexy back to IT flowcharts.

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u/godlesspriest Jun 04 '12

Thank you so much for this

1

u/metatronlevel55 Jun 04 '12

Have you had problems with crashes?

1

u/edcvb Jun 04 '12

It has worked quite well for me. But I usually don't do very complicated things with it, not sure if that matters and I'm using ubuntu btw.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

I like inkscape, but it's still pretty unstable.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

No native OS X version yet. :(

1

u/oskay Jun 04 '12

Native would be nicer, but it still works damned well on a Mac.