[plug] Adobe or similar software

sol sol at autonomon.net
Fri May 24 20:30:55 WST 2002


On Fri, 24 May 2002 15:42, Adrian Woodley wrote:
>     As good as the GIMP is, its really only good for image creation and
> minipulation  of print and online images. What I mean by that is that its
> not so good for photoquality printing. True, it will do photos and I myself
> have printed several after editing them in the GIMP, however the GIMP is
> limited to only 8bits/channel, where as Photoshop can handle at least
> 16bits/channel. This is a must for true colour printing.
> 
Not too sure about the specs, but I've found Imagemagick to be a handy 
package, although it is a command line package. It allows for batch 
processing and can convert to virtually any format including .ps and .eps 
which I'm assuming are handy formats for printing - they've worked for me 
anyway. Altogether, Imagemagick can do quite a bit including a couple things 
that the GIMP can't do - yet.

If you're looking more for a poster/page design kind of package then take a 
look at Scribus. It's in the early stages of development, but when I 
downloaded it and tried it out I found it stable, easy to use (it doesn't 
have a manual yet, but I still managed to work it out), and you can save in 
pdf format.

And I can't finish this without putting in a plug for the unfairly maligned 
Kword. True, there's still work to be done on Kword, but it's heading in a 
very promising direction. It now offers the option of creating a document 
with a frame-based approach. This is VERY flexible, and has quite a few good 
features and is seriously easy to use - and it has a good manual that comes 
with it. On the downside it doesn't have much to offer in export formats at 
the moment.  But Kword is heading in the direction of being a fully fledged 
desktop publishing solution and I think it's flexibility makes it the pick of 
the OSS word processors. That's my 2cents worth.

Good luck,
sol



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