More Software Savings

As if on cue, the latest issue of Intercom arrived on my doorstep with a cover story called “Free or Open-Source Tools for Technical Communicators, Part I: The Software” by Charles Curley — just a couple of days after I posted “Saving on Software.” Intercom is a magazine published by the Society for Technical Communication and is available to members.

The article features several recommendations for free software, software useful to anyone who touches a computer. I haven’t tried any of the programs yet, but I’m very excited about them, especially the…you’ll see.

Some of the recommendations include:

OpenOffice, an office suite that includes programs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc., similar to the programs in Microsoft Office. Compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac. You can work on Microsoft Office files with OpenOffice, and save files in Microsoft format. You can also save files in PDF format without a separate PDF program.

AbiWord, a word processing program, similar to Microsoft Word. Compatible with Windows, Linux, QNX, FreeBSD or Solaris. According to the AbiWord website: “AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice.org documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more.” You can also save files in PDF format.

GIMP, an image manipulation program that includes photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. An alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Compatible with Windows, Unix and Mac.

Nvu, a website authoring tool. According to the Nvu website: “A complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for ‘new view’) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.” According to Curley, the claim of rivaling FrontPage may be a bit of an exaggeration, but Nvu is an impressive program, good for one-off or light websites.

Scribus, a page layout program. From the Scribus website: “Scribus is a cross-platform open source page layout program with the aim of producing commercial grade output in PDF and Postscript. Originally developed on Linux, Scribus also runs natively on MacOSX and Windows 2000 and XP.”

PDFCreator, a program that makes PDF documents from Windows programs. This is the one I’m most excited about trying. I hope it works with Publisher.

To learn about more free, open-source software, Curley recommends:

http://sourceforge.net/

http://freshmeat.net/

http://osswin.sourceforge.net/

http://directory.fsf.org/