emudir

Forgive us for going on about graphics programs, having featured both GIMP and Serif Photo Plus in the not-so-distant past, it’s probably not time for another one yet. So… here’s a graphic editor.

While you groan away, here’s some things to like about Paint.Net. Despite being Windows only (and requiring .Net 3.5), it supports layers, contains an automatic updater (which, in a moment of what can only be described as clear thinking, good design and sheer sanity, can be made to install the update once you’ve finished using the program), and a plethora of effects. …read more »

Every so often, my PC gets a problem. This one was quite serious, however – more so than usual. Basically, the network stopped working altogether. Not good. So, as usual, out came the setup CDs. And when it came to graphics software, I thought – why not have a look what else is free?

And then I thought of this. Serif give away free Starter Editions of their graphics suites. Specifically, I’m going to look at Photo Plus, the starter edition of which is available from their site.

Essentially, it does pretty much everything that you would expect of a modern piece of graphics editing software …read more »

An excellent article on Just Creative Design, about making your own fonts set me thinking about making my own fonts. But it’s a shame that he didn’t mention the excellent free software program FontForge.

FontForge can edit many forms of fonts – Windows’ TrueType and OpenType, many types of Mac fonts, and X11′s bitmap fonts – although the level of support is currently variable. It can, of course, convert from one format to another as well. …read more »

Perhaps the last area of Microsoft Office that didn’t have a direct competitor is Visio. The nearest competitors are probably Libre Office’s Draw component, and dia. Highly capable as a flowcharting and diagramming tool in its own right, dia can load and save Visio diagrams and can thus be considered a competitor to Visio. (Although it can only use the open and documented .vdx format, rather than Visio’s default .vsd)

Unlike Visio, however, dia is designed more for informal graphs …read more »

Have you ever been in the position where you needed to edit a picture – perhaps as little as crop or resize a photo, or remove the red eye effect – but can’t. Maybe you even have paid for Adobe Photoshop, but just haven’t got it installed on the computer you’re on? Well, the GNU Image Manipulation Program can help. …read more »