Alternatives to Adobe
Adobe has a software donation program, but its guidelines are fairly restrictive their complex fine print may exclude many environmental organizations. However, there are solid substitutes for most common Adobe products. This article summarizes some of the alternatives to the most commonly-used Adobe products.
|
Adobe Product |
Use |
Substitute Products |
|---|---|---|
| InDesign |
Desktop Publishing |
Quark XPress is InDesign's main competitor (such as it still has one). Quark makes Quark XPress available to nonprofits at a discounted rate of ~$300 (the software retails for about $1000). However please note, it is not available yet for those who use Mac OS X. http://www.quark.com/sales/desktop/purchase/nonprofit.html Microsoft Publisher is suitable for very low-end desktop publishing projects (e.g. flyers, short newsletters), but is not widely used by professional graphic designers and print houses. A promising, but still "immature" option might be Scribus, an open-source desktop publishing program. (http://www.scribus.net/). Scribus can run under Mac, Windows and Linux. |
|
Photoshop |
Image Editing |
Adobe Photoshop Elements is Adobes consumer image editing product, and offers most of the features that nonprofits need to prepare images for the Web. Can be purchased at retail for <$100. XnView is a powerful, reasonably easy-to-use image editing program that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It's free for personal and non-commercial use. A great choice. http://www.xnview.com Picasa is a free, beautifully designed, extremely easy-to-use image management and editing tool from Google. It's great for managing and touching up photos. Its resizing functions could be a bit better, though. http://www.picasa.com. The GIMP is free, open-source photoediting software for Linux, Windows and Mac. It has a reputation of being somewhat difficult to use, but offers a fairly solid set of features at zero cost. http://www.gimp.org/ |
|
Acrobat |
Creating PDF files |
You may already have all of the PDF creation software you need! Mac OS X includes the ability to create basic PDF files from almost any program that can print. Similarly, Microsoft Office 2007 and above include a built-in "Save As PDF" option. If the built-in capabilities of your existing operating system/application software aren't enough, then you might consider: PDFCreator ($0) is a free, open-source PDF creation tool for Windows only. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ PDF995 ($0) is a free (but not open-source) PDF creation tool that runs on Windows NT/2000/XP only. http://www.pdf995.com/ |
|
Illustrator, Freehand |
Digital illustration |
Inkscape ($0) is an open-source alternative to Illustrator or Freehand for creating scalable vector graphics. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. http://www.inkscape.org |
Finally, its also worth noting that Adobe offers very reasonable upgrade pricing on most of its products. So, if you already own a legit-but-outdated version of an Adobe product, you can easily buy the latest version for a pretty reasonable price typically $75-$150 for most products.
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Russell