Here’s an update on how the open source experiment is going.

First, I was never able to get Blender to work with the ATI Radeon card that came with my computer, so I bought an XFX GeForce 5200 FX online, and Blender now works! But it’s slower than I thought it would be. ~sigh~

I’ve gotten LaTeX to use Minion Pro, and I started typesetting As a Man Thinketh, but TeX is choking on the file and I don’t know why. I haven’t put much time into it, though; I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out soon.

The GIMP has pretty much all the functionality Photoshop has (at least the parts of Photoshop I use frequently), but it still has a lot of usability issues. Photoshop is far more polished, and it doesn’t feel like somebody took a dresser drawer full of clothes and flung it across the room.

On a similar note, today I worked on some wedding invitations for a friend. I began with the GIMP, since that’s the natural choice for doing work involving photos. And the photo part was easy enough, although I really wish the space bar would allow me to pan. ~sigh~ Anyway, it’s when I started adding text that my frustrations began. First, all the text in a box has to be the same size and font, which is bothersome. Second, OpenType features aren’t supported, so no oldstyle figures for me. Third, not even the hinting on my Minion Pro font was supported, so the tracking and kerning was hideously off.

So I switched to Inkscape for the text, figuring I’d just export to an image and then paste it into the GIMP. Inkscape did let me change the size and weight and such of the text within a box, but it still didn’t support OpenType, and the hinting was the same as in the GIMP. I started laboriously going through the text by hand, setting the tracking to look the way I wanted it. (And hoping my friend wouldn’t want many changes to the text.) And roughly ten percent of the time, the granularity of the tracking wasn’t enough for my tastes — it would jump back and forth between way too much and way too little.

At this point I thought I’d give Scribus a try, to see if things got any better. Opened it up, placed a textbox, and pasted in my text. And I was delighted to see that the hinting worked! It makes a huge difference, let me tell you. But then I tried to select some text — um, what’s up with text selection in Scribus? It’s hard to select anything. And then when I tried to add some text to the box, it kept moving my cursor to the end of the paragraph after I typed each character! One by one, I had to click back at the proper spot. And there was a plethora of other usability issues as well. But in the end, after taking about four times as long as it should have taken, the project was complete and I was satisfied enough to consider it done.

Overall, I haven’t exactly been impressed with these open source tools. (With the sole exception of Blender, which I absolutely adore.) Sure, people work on them in their spare time, and so naturally they’re not going to be as polished as Creative Suite, but still — how can they sleep at night knowing their tools are such a pain to use? I know I shouldn’t complain, because the GIMP and Inkscape and Scribus are certainly better than nothing, and a lot of work has gone into them. It’s just sad to see that the usability is so pathetic.

But since I haven’t bought a new Mac yet, I’m committed to using these tools for the time being, and I’ll make them do what I want. And in the meantime I’ll dream of InDesign and Photoshop. ~wistful sigh~

Posted in Photoshop, InDesign, Open Source
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