Cover StorY 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: Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint. been fantastic for students, professionals and businesses Talike who are looking for useful and comprehensive free software. 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: Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw. application in LibreOffice can output files to the relevant Microsoft extension. This means for a text document in Writer, Scribus you can save it as .docx, so it will load easily on Microsoft Scribus is a powerful desktop publishing 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 printing, 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, spreadsheets, 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 spreadsheet 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, Book) scribus.net LibreOffice Office Suite libreoffice.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 pages, 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 books lyx.org Grammarly Grammar checker grammarly.com Mendeley PDF library mendeley.com Calibre 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.