Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

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As far as undercutting them, there is

GIMP: http://gimp.org - Gimp is for doing photo editing work. People hate on the gimp for not have 16 bit color support, but this point should be moot for the overwhelming majority of users. I've used GIMP to edit photos, then sold them on iStockphoto where they have been used in advertising.

I've been using gimp for ~10 years and I've never come across something that I can't do with it. (Including the "content aware fill" thing from about a year ago: http://newslily.com/blogs/96). I'm a pretty big GIMP fan.

People also hate on it's interface. If you've grown up on photoshop, sure, but I can work faster in GIMP than I can in anything (including photoshop).

Inkscape: http://inkscape.org/ - I use inkscape every single day for doing advertising materials at my job. I've done ads that have been published in nationally-syndicated magazines with this, and have done work for enormous, internationally-recognized brands with this. Inkscape is a fantastic piece of software.

Scribus: http://scribus.org - Scribus is for doing page layouts. While I don't use it extensively anymore, I have used it for publishing work in the past. It is a fantastic, very complete piece of software that will do everything that you want to do with it.

This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work. The only things you're going to get with Adobe's products is support for their proprietary formats.

> This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work.

That depends on the work you need to do. I don't pirate software on principle, so I used to use exactly those three applications, along with OpenOffice, for my everyday needs. However, when I started needing tools to do real work for real money, my perspective changed: the glaring weaknesses in the OSS software compared to the serious professional tools made it easily worth dropping £1,000+ on things like CS5.

In the interests of fairness, since "glaring weaknesses" is a somewhat strong term, I will list a few of the more obvious ones:

- No serious typography support (e.g., using OpenType features; flexible antialiasing for screen graphics; flexible H&J settings).

- No serious colour support (e.g., integrating Pantone spot colours).

- No layer styles.

The Adobe apps have their problems, to be sure, but on even these basic points the "competition" is lagging many years behind.

This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work. The only things you're going to get with Adobe's products is support for their proprietary formats.

Actually, the one thing i think most people are paying for when it comes to indesign is adobe's type engine, which behaves predictably and also supports the kitchen sink of opentype features. It's easy to dismiss ot support as a convenience function (it is at some level), but it's the killer feature for any typographic application where you want to use the full range of type available to you in the font (family?) you paid oh so much money for.

I once designed using a version of futura that had the small caps & osfs in the glyphs menu (untagged!) and was livid when i had to set nearly a paragraph of text by inserting each one at a time. Since the last time i checked when i was in grad school [1], this was still an outstanding issue in scribus (shaky opentype smcp/dlig/salt support) and it's really the one that kept me from ditching indesign. As it was, i would probably have jumped ship and used latex/xetex had i not been trying to individually rag each line.

It's not like you can't make nice work in scribus, but it may also be more convenient to do it in a program that has solid support (and mostly tuned ui) for the features that many typographers use.

[1]: https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1413

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