[Balug-Talk] DTP, vector graphics, bitmap graphics

['Rick Moen']

[Cc'ing balug-talk, as this thread may be of public interest.]

Quoting Andrew Fife (afife at untangle.com):

> Also regarding F/OSS alternatives to MS Publisher, I've used OpenOffice a
> fair amount in the past and always found "Draw" to be lacking quite a bit
> relative to MS Visio.  IMHO, the worst application of the OpenOffice suite
> by far.  However, I think for the purpose of making BALUG flyers it will
> do just fine.

I'm nobody's idea of an expert on _that_ subject ("Dammit, Jim, I'm a
sysadmin, not a graphic designer"), but I wouldn't have thought that a 
vector-graphics program such as MS Visio or OO.o Draw would be the right
tool:  Wouldn't you generally want either a DTP or a bitmap graphics
program?

FWIW, the guy I shave has a couple of knowledgebase categories:
"Desktop Publishing" and "Graphics" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Apps

Last time I had to do a LAN diagram (a typical if modest vector graphics
scenario), I found Dia to be good enough.  I hear that Sodipodi,
Inkscape, and Xara Xtreme are a great deal more advanced, though.


Basically:

Vector Graphics
---------------
Sodipodi
Inkscape
Xara Xtreme
OpenOffice.org (or Go-OO) Draw
Synfig (beta)
Karbon14 (KDE)
Kivio (KDE) (flowcharts, etc. - mostly a come-on for proprietary plugins)
Dia (GNOME) (flowcharts, etc.)
Sketsa (proprietary, Java, does SVG only)
Sun Star Office Draw (proprietary)

Bitmap Graphics
---------------
(I don't really have anything about this, and need to work on it.)
CinePaint
GIMP
JDraw
KolourPaint
TuxPaint  (Go, Bill Kendrick!)
GIMPshop
Krita (KDE)
MtPaint
Mootif
Gogh
Paint.NET
Seashore
Tile Studio
Pixen
Pixel Image Editor (proprietary)
Photogenics (proprietary)
Picasa (proprietary, WINElib app)

Desktop Publishing
------------------
OpenOffice.org 
Scribus
ImPress (beta)


There are lots of related categories I'm ignoring, above, including UML
editors, image viewers, Web-gallery apps....