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 Image editor, since 1996! Huge user base, and tons of plugins available. | gimp.org | |
| Krita Roughly in the same category as the Gimp, but with more of an emphasis on painting. Features many exciting tools and abilities such as wraparound editing, symmetry editing, color mesh, mesh transform, and robust brush configurability. | krita.org | |
| Blender Although Blender is primarily for 3D modeling, there are a number of features that can be used for 2D design, such as the grease pencil, and the Freestyle rendering type. Also extremely useful is Blender's modifier stack, which makes it very easy to make complex shapes out of a few operations. Laidout's node system is heavily inspired by Blender's nodes. | blender.org | |
| Inkscape The go to open source vector graphics editor based in svg. Very active development, tons of filters and extensions. | inkscape.org | |
| Mypaint Amazing software for drawing. Minimal interface, but powerful brush engine. | mypaint.app | |
| Graphicsmagick Utilities Command line tools Very similar to Imagemagick from which it forked, but implemented differently in places. | www.graphicsmagick.org | |
| Imagemagick Utilities Command line tools to do a plethora of image tinkering. | www.imagemagick.org | |
| Scribus Capable DTP, with image caching for image heavy documents. Extensive PDF abilities. In terms of functionality, what's missing is impositioning. | www.scribus.net | |
| FontForge A powerful font creation program. If you want to make fonts with open source software, for a very long time, this was your only option. Be sure to set aside a fair amount of time to learn the interface. | fontforge.org | |
| Fontra For font creation, this one's kind of the new kid on the block. Time will tell if it goes the way of Metapolator and Trufont! It runs in the browser, so you have to host your own server, which can be done locally. It was created by Just von Rossum, the younger brother of Guido von Rossum who created the Python language. | fontra.xyz | |
| Electric Zine Maker A dtp specifically for rapidly making simple folded zines. Its interface is totally unique and amazing. There is a version of this that is fully open source, but the current major release is not. | unicornycopia.com/ezm | |
Other Artsy Software | |||
| Darktable A raw image processor. Mass edit photos from your camera to get color more to your liking. | darktable.org | ||
| Raw Therapee Another raw image processor, similar in use to Darktable. | rawtherapee.com | ||
| Pdfimpose.it A fabulous open source, online PDF imposer from Louis Paternault. It has several imposition schemes to choose from, including a cut and stack method not yet available in Laidout! | pdfimpose.it | ||
| TeX/LaTeX The quintessential, very powerful layout engine, though admiration for it's flexibility and sophistication might be tempered by the fact that it works from text configuration files, so good luck with the learning curve! | tug.org | ||
| Lyx Kind of a graphical front end for TeX/LaTeX | lyx.org | ||
| LibreOffice Forked from Openoffice in 2010, when Oracle bought Sun. Most of the OpenOffice devs switched over to LibreOffice. Oracle later sold off OpenOffice to Apache. | libreoffice.org | ||
| Calligra Words Formerly Kword, an easy word processor. MUCH smaller than Libreoffice. Its file format these days is odf, like LibreOffice. | calligra.org/words | ||
| 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 that lets you play a mini-game of worms. It is very important for software to inspire the proper work ethic, and the Inspiration option does that admirably by allowing you to play a mini-game of worms! No longer in development since 2007. | www.stacken.kth.se/project/pptout | ||
| 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. | github.com/podofo/podofo | ||
| Psutils Command line utilities to perform various things like booklet impositioning on postscript files | psutil.readthedocs.io/en/latest | ||
The Big Bucks | ||
| Adobe InDesign | (wikipedia) | |
| Adobe Pagemaker (formerly Aldus) Development abandonded in 2004 | (wikipedia) | |
| Adobe Freehand (formerly Macromedia Freehand, formerly Aldus) Development abandonded in 2007 | (wikipedia) | |
| So-Far-Not-Adobe CorelDRAW Has imposition features! | (wikipedia) | |
| So-Far-Not-Adobe QuarkXPress | (wikipedia) | |
The Small Bucks | ||
| Affinity Bought out by Canva, which then made it free to use, but AI features cost money to use. Free to use, but not open source. | affinity.studio | |
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Pdf Snake An inexpensive online pdf imposer. This lets you impose pdfs in a wide variety of ways in a somewhat straightforward way. |
pdfsnake.app | |
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PageStream Has existed since 1985, runs on even Amigas and Atari!! Unclear whether it is still being developed. |
pagestream.org |
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