Magazine's and book's publishers Desktop Publishing Departments around the globe, are full of Adobe's super products like Photoshop [for photo processing] , Illustrator [for vector graphics] and Indesign [for design layouts].

Looking at "the other side of the coin", I knew the existence of Photoshop's alternative, the well known image manipulation program Gimp, but I never had look if there were any Open Source applications for vector or layout design.

Searching further for free alternatives I found two real gems:
1. Inskape, that is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG) file format.
Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping.
Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

and
2. Scribus, that 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.
While the goals of the program are to make professional page layout accessible for beginners without limiting support for professional publishing features such as: spot color support, CMYK color, high grade PDF creation, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of color separations.
Scribus was a really surprise for me because all these years I was not imagine that could be a so professional open source layout application.

Well, it's amazing what you really can do with the above Open Source applications!
And this is a prove that if you want to use Open Source software for real professional results, in a strong demanding environment, you CAN DO IT!

And if you are looking for some great free photo processing tools you can take a look at Mediachance's free tools. They will surprise you! [I know these are not Open Source ;-)]

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