At the Central Sydney ASTC meeting about graphics last night, Daryl (presenting) mentioned the high cost of vector drawing tools like Illustrator. With so much open-source and other free software around, I asked if anyone knew of any free alternatives, but no-one could think of any. Having had a look tonight, I?ve found a couple of tools that sound well worth a look: http://www.inkscape.org/ "Open Source Scalable Vector Graphics Editor" Their website looks very professional, and it says that just yesterday, Google provided some funding to the project, so it sounds very promising. http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/DrawPlus/ "DrawPlus 4 - Free Graphic Design and Vector Drawing Software" Again, a very neat website, but this time from a commercial venture ? the company gives away old versions of their software and sells the latest ones. (DrawPlus 7 is the current version.) They offer a whole suite of free tools: PhotoPlus (which I?ve just downloaded too!), PagePlus for desktop publishing, WebPlus and 3DPlus. (I haven?t used OpenOffice.org Draw much, but that too is a free alternative for vector graphics.) Also, for raster graphics, there are free paint programs such as "the Gimp", which has many great Photoshop-like features (such as selecting areas by colour similarity). I?d downloaded it a while ago but not really used it, partly through a lack of need and partly a lack of decent documentation. Just the other night though I had good cause to try it out, to touch-up some close-up photos of people. I tried its Clone tool, which like the one in Photoshop copies a soft-edged area of pixels so you can erase things, and it removed some blemishes really well. In the archives on Yahoo, there?s another short list of free graphics tools: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/austechwriter/message/10943 Having previously also mentioned Picasa and Photoshop Album Starter Edition, I?m just amazed at how much great software you can get for free! Thanks, Daryl, for a very stimulating meeting, and I hope some of the attendees who were interested in alternative tools see this message. Regards, Craig ===== My e-mail address is: ===== craigh(at)attachesoftware(dot)com ===== (I may not see messages sent to my Yahoo address) Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com ************************************************** To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. To search the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx **************************************************