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Free & Open Source Software

forWant free, Everyone super useful software? Yes! We all do! If you think the best software is all products you have to pay lots of money for, then you haven’t looked hard enough.

Vijai Dharmamony Illustration by Manender Singh by Illustration

14 | Science Reporter | December 2018 HE growth of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has Alternative to: , Corel Photo-Paint. been fantastic for students, professionals and businesses Talike who are looking for useful and comprehensive . While we all know what “free” means, “open source” means all the code of the software is available on the internet and you can change it or build on it if you want to. FOSS used to be thought of as the inferior alternative to paid software applications. However, times have changed. Now, businesses are encouraged to use as much FOSS as possible, both to reduce costs, but also to be able to easily build on existing software and be involved in the ongoing development of the tool itself as a growing product. Open source applications are maintained and updated by a community user base of individuals and businesses. Anyone can add to an open source project and add functionality for use in their own products. If the changes submitted to the project are accepted by the owner, they will be included in the newer versions of the product that everyone can download. With so many people (and big businesses) working on these projects, many open source software applications now rival paid products and match or sometimes outstrip these products in their functions. Using free and open source software is ethical and avoids GIMP piracy. While plenty of people use pirated versions of MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, or SPSS, it means that the versions will probably be old or buggy, you can’t update them, and Inkscape worst of all, you leave yourself open to malware. You don’t Inkscape, unlike GIMP, works with vector graphics. Vector want your computer to erase all your data just because you’re graphics are based on mathematical formulas and look exactly using a pirated copy of some software, do you? the same when resized – whether they are 1 cm x 1cm or 100 This article is dedicated to some of the very best and most m x 100 m. This is why graphic designers, web designers, and useful free and open source software that students, hobbyists animators usually work with vector graphics. It also means and professionals can use to produce amazing and complex that you can use Inkscape to create pieces of artwork to hang creations. Anyone can download these tools and they are all on your wall, posters for school assignments, or even start to completely free for the full versions. create images for your own brand! All the listed software can be used offline, so you don’t Features offered with Inkscape include paths, text, need internet access to do your work. Most of the listed gradients, and more; with import available from JPG, VSD, software applications are portable too (e.g. viaportableapps. GIF, PDF and other formats, and export to a full range of com) — meaning you can carry it on a USB flash drive (pen drive) and use on any computer without actually installing it there — perfect for school use or when you don’t own a laptop.

GIMP GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the gold standard when it comes to free image editing software and is an excellent alternative to the very expensive Adobe Photoshop suite. GIMP contains most of the things you will find in paid image editors. This includes photo retouching, complete artwork creation, and more. It has many advanced features once you start to explore. There are plenty of beginner tutorials through to advanced tutorials available online through GIMP’s documentation, YouTube, and fan-produced walkthroughs, so you will be able to get up to speed in a few lessons. Photographers, artists, students, and hobbyists on a budget all use GIMP. This is the perfect tool to help produce images in your assignments, retouch photos for social media, or make an artistic gift for a family member. Inkscape

December 2018 | Science Reporter | 15 different file formats including SVG, EPS, and TEX. Like also Math which is handy for use in mathematics subjects and GIMP, there are many different tutorials available online to Base which is like the Microsoft Access database program. learn this software. While files are automatically saved to .odt format, each Alternative to: , Corel Draw. application in LibreOffice can output files to the relevant Microsoft extension. This means for a text document in Writer, you can save it as .docx, so it will load easily on Microsoft Scribus is a powerful software for creating Word. This is perfect for if you have an assignment that needs and editing complex and colourful page layouts like brochures, to be submitted in a particular format. newsletters, and posters, which are often needed in assignments. Alternative to: Microsoft Office, WPS Office This makes it excellent both for creating presentations as well as professional business documents for applying for further WordWeb studies or work. Sick of typing in and looking up definitions and synonyms on If you are struggling to use MS Word or PowerPoint to your browser/dictionary all the time? WordWeb is a handy create one of these types of projects, then you should try Scribus utility that quickly provides you the definition, example usage, instead. Scribus supports professional publishing features such synonyms, and antonyms of any given word, as well as readable as CMYK colours, spot colours, ICC colour management and and audible pronunciations (for many words). versatile PDF creation. Scribus has many unexpected touches, The application stays running in the background on your such as powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge computer and can be activated by holding down CTRL and number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of right-clicking on a word in almost any program. The application colour blindness or the rendering of markup languages like also gives you the option to quickly cross-reference Wikipedia LaTeX (see #14: LyX) or Lilypond. and other online dictionary references. WordWeb allows you Alternative to: Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress to maintain your workflow and save time, no matter what task you are working on.

Blender If you need to create 3D computer graphics or models, then Blender is the toolset you are looking for. Using Blender, it’s possible to create animations, models for 3D , 3D interactive elements for websites, and video games with Blender’s 3D video game engine. If you are taking a class in animation or graphics, or you are interested in it as a hobby, then you need to download Blender. The tool has everything you need to produce 3D graphic creations, including modelling, rigging, texturing, motion tracking and video tracking. Alternative to: Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max Scribus Blender

LibreOffice Microsoft Office is the desktop suite of tools people use around the world for word processing, , presentations and more. However, the suite itself can be quite costly to purchase, even on a student account. Thankfully, the free LibreOffice suite replicates almost all the features of desktop Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and is compatible with all Microsoft Office file formats. LibreOffice is essential for schoolwork if you don’t have Microsoft Office. With LibreOffice Writer, you can create text documents just like in Word. You can use Calc instead of Excel for your program. Impress is the presentation app that works just like PowerPoint. There’s

16 | Science Reporter | December 2018 Free and open source software applications, what each is used for, and download link.

Software Use Get here GIMP Photo and Image editor gimp.org

Inkscape Image editor (vector graphics) inkscape.org

Scribus Desktop publishing (Brochure, Magazine, ) scribus.net LibreOffice Office Suite .org WordWeb Offline English dictionary and thesaurus wordweb.info Blender 3D creation suite. Supports animation and game creation. blender.org Simplenote Keep notes across all your devices simplenote.com PDFsam Basic Split, merge, extract , mix and rotate PDF files R Statistical computing and graphics cran.r-project.org QGIS Create, edit, visualize, analyze geospatial information qgis.org yEd Graph Editor Flowcharts, diagrams yworks.com/products/yed Veusz Scientific plotting and graphing program veusz.github.io ImageJ Image processing and analysis imagej.nih.gov/ij LyX Creation of structured documents like theses and .org Grammarly Grammar checker grammarly.com Mendeley PDF library mendeley.com E-book management calibre-ebook.com PicPick Full-featured screen capture tool picpick.app/en/ Google Drive 15 GB of online storage google.com/drive CCleaner Speed up your PC ccleaner.com

Simplenote R While there are plenty of free notetaking tools out there, such Learning a programming language is one of the best skills as Evernote or Google Keep, Simplenote has a few features that you can pick up in high school. Even if you don’t end up that make it really stand out. Simplenote is an easy way to becoming a programmer, learning how to do it can teach you keep notes, lists and ideas, which is super quick and easy and to look at the world (and computers!) in a different and more works everywhere, showing all your notes, across all your analytical way. R is a programming language that has been devices as well as in your browser! One of the best features created with a specific goal in mind: statistics and graphics of Simplenote is its revision control system, which means that creation and manipulation. This makes it perfect for those you can go back and look at previous versions of your notes times when you are supposed to be using software like SPSS. that you’ve since changed. You can also share with others and SPSS and other statistical programs are usually extremely they can add to your notes with this application. expensive, but R is free. Of course, you won’t have to code Alternative to: Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, Evernote complete statistics programs from scratch. There are plenty of R packages available that can help you along the way. Try PDFsam Basic a course on Coursera or Udemy on R to get started with this Working with PDF files can be a pain as they are very difficult language. to change. PDFsam Basic allows you to do some things with Alternative to: IBM SPSS, SigmaPlot, Orange PDF files that are impossible to do just with the usual Reader. You can use PDFsam Basic to split PDF files QGIS into a separate PDF for each page, merge two different PDF If you are working with graphical geography data such as world documents, mix PDF documents (combine scans of even pages maps, then QGIS is an indispensable tool. This software allows that have been separated from scans of odd pages), rotate , you to work with “geospatial data” which allows you to see or just pick out particular pages from a PDF file. the map and then add or change specific data. Using QGIS

December 2018 | Science Reporter | 17 you can edit, manage, analyze and import/export data. QGIS have been developed by the active ImageJ community, such supports both vector and raster layers and works with many as radiological image processing, distortion correction, image other geographic data software. stitching and biological image analysis (via the “Fiji” ImageJ Alternative to: Esri ArcGIS, Surfer derivative). Fiji is like a supercharged version of ImageJ and comes pre-loaded with many plugins to do different types of yEd Graph Editor image analysis, making it the better choice if you want more Creating visually appealing diagrams has been notoriously functionality. difficult to date. yEd Graph Editor changes all that by providing Alternative to: Image-Pro powerful yet simple and intuitive software that helps users to create flow charts, network topographies, top-down charts, UML diagrams, and more. With it, you can create all those charts for your assignments and presentations that are way too tricky and fiddly using other tools. The software has a drag and drop interface with a self- adjusting feature that can automatically organize the parts into clean positions, so you don’t have to spend hours trying to make everything look perfect. You can even import data from Excel and output to a number of formats including PDF, GIF, JPG, and Encapsulated PostScript. Alternative to: , draw.io,

Veusz Need to plot data – either 2 dimensionally or 3 dimensionally? ImageJ Veusz is the tool that allows you to do it easily and for free. The tool features a beautiful and simple to use interface, where you LyX can make manual adjustments on any graph. Import data from LyX is a word-processing software application that is based on text files, CSV, HDF5, binary and other sources and create LaTeX, which has become the choice of document production complex 2D and 3D plots for modelling statistical data. The for scientists, mathematicians, and anyone looking to produce plots that you create can be point or line, plus 2D data can be journal papers, theses, and even books. Why would you use modelled as bar graphs, box plots, stacked plots, contour plots, LaTeX instead of MS Word or LibreOffice Writer? and more, and are available in either black and white or colour. Well, Word is a What You See Is What You Get These can then be exported to EPS/PDF/PNG/SVG/EMF. (WYSIWYG) editor. That means what you type on the page Alternative to: SigmaPlot, JMP, gnuplot and the formatting options you use is how the document will look if you print it. LaTeX is what’s known as a What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) editor. That means that you will see bits of code written in the document, that are used to format it only when you print, or use a viewer to see what it would look like in real life. LyX is an editor that is used to produce LaTex documents more easily, without having to write all those extra lines of code. In short, it’s everything your word processor is lacking if you are producing academic content. Getting a head start with LyX and LaTeX in high school is great preparation for university studies.

Veusz Grammarly Even the best writers still make grammar errors! Grammarly ImageJ is to grammar as spellcheck is to spelling. Unfortunately, Image analysis is a complex activity. However, there is a free grammar checkers in applications like are not tool that can help achieve these goals. This software is used very advanced and miss many grammar errors. by scientific researchers and students to analyse, process, edit, Grammarly highlights possible spelling and grammar save and print images. You can input a range of image formats mistakes in your text, suggests changes and provides feedback including TIFF, PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP, DICOM, FITS, and on the grammar level of what you have written. There’s an raw formats. application for Windows, a Google Chrome plugin, a website, Its functionality is extended by the use of plugins that and mobile apps available, so you really can use Grammarly

18 | Science Reporter | December 2018 anywhere. Be careful though – Grammarly isn’t always right, brightness and more. Save images and share easily with so check through the corrections before accepting them in PickPic. your text. The application also makes it very easy to set up hotkeys Alternative to: Ginger if you find yourself using particular functions often. Hotkeys Mendeley are keyboard shortcuts – like CTRL+V for paste instead of When you are doing research assignments, it’s always important right-clicking then paste. By defining your own hotkeys for to quote your sources, and remember where they came from. PicPick you don’t need to do so much clicking to take advanced This can become a bit difficult when it’s not a website you screenshots. This software is free for personal use only. visited, but a PDF, Word document or other paper that you Alternative to: Greenshot have come across. Rather than just saving it on your computer somewhere, Google Drive you can use Mendeley to organise these documents. Think of Cloud storage is a necessity these days, especially when you it like a document store for your studies where you can access have so much important school work saved. Whether you them from anywhere, and even quote or link to them in your accidentally delete files for good or you drop a drink on your assignments (using share functionality). Mendeley has a full-text laptop which breaks your hard drive, you need a backup. search so you can find what you need easily, plus you can add Google Drive can be used to backup any files and/or folders virtual notes on your documents too. Many university students on your computer and ensure the version stored in the Google use Mendeley in their studies so learning this software early Drive cloud is the same as the version stored on your computer. can be beneficial down the track, too. These files and folders are then available anywhere with an Alternative to: EndNote, Citavi, Zotero internet connection: smartphone, tablet, or computer, and you can share them or download them whenever and wherever Calibre you please. Need to manage your e-books? Calibre is the number one free Google gives everyone 15GB of free storage, plus an tool for the job. Calibre is simple to use and has a range of unlimited number of photos (max 16MP) and videos (max different functions. You can convert e-books from one format 1080p) under Google Photos using the “high quality” setting. to another (like MOBI to PDF), create libraries of e-books, Alternative to: Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive edit e-books, and extract, create, or edit metadata (like Title, Author) of each book. There’s searching and sorting, plus you CCleaner can add tags that help you to organize your collection further. This software application is designed not to make you more Once books are converted to the right format you can download productive, but to make your computer more productive. to your Kindle or e-reader. There’s also a sharing function so CCleaner will delete temporary and unwanted files, plus clean others can enjoy your e-books. browser history (that’s deleting all the names and addresses of the websites you’ve visited), cookies (used to store your website visit details), file fragments (like deleted files where bits have accidentally been left), plus other unneeded application data. There are plenty of options to choose from, such as keeping your autocomplete records (such as automatically filling in your name and address on a website). Use CCleaner every so often to give your computer a tune up – like a mechanic. Once your computer is cleaned you may find that it runs faster than before and you’ve freed up a lot of memory. All the software listed here are free, powerful and packed full of features – and only the basics have been covered, there Calibre is plenty more to discover! For an in-depth look, make sure to visit the software’s website and check out an introductory PicPick YouTube video to see each in action. Windows screenshots can be really handy, but sometimes you These days free and open source software can be just as need something a bit more powerful. What if you want to take good as (or better than!) paid software. It can take some time a picture of a whole webpage, scrolling down? You can’t do to adjust to a different application than the one that you are that with Windows alone. used to, so be patient and you will get there. This list is just a PicPick is the screenshot tool that can help you do scrolling start for what’s out there in the world of FOSS. screenshotting and more. PicPick offers screen capture of the whole screen, a particular program, or part of the screen that Dr. Vijai Dharmamony is a Research Scientist at the State Key you select. You can then edit screenshot pictures including Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Xiamen University, adding blurring, frames, watermarks, increasing/decreasing China; Email: [email protected]

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