Free & Open Source Software for Everyone

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Free & Open Source Software for Everyone Want free, 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.

Illustration by Manender Singh

Vijai Dharmamony

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HE growth of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has been fantastic for students, professionals and businesses alike 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 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 worst of all, you leave yourself open to malware. You don’t want your computer to erase all your data just because you’re using a pirated copy of some software, do you? This article is dedicated to some of the very best and most useful free and open source software that students, hobbyists and professionals can use to produce amazing and complex creations. Anyone can download these tools and they are all completely free for the full versions. All the listed software can be used offline, so you don’t need internet access to do your work. Most of the listed software applications are portable too (e.g. viaportableapps. 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.

Alternative to: Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint.

GIMP

Inkscape Inkscape, unlike GIMP, works with vector graphics. Vector graphics are based on mathematical formulas and look exactly the same when resized – whether they are 1 cm x 1cm or 100 m x 100 m. This is why graphic designers, web designers, and animators usually work with vector graphics. It also means that you can use Inkscape to create pieces of artwork to hang on your wall, posters for school assignments, or even start to create images for your own brand! Features offered with Inkscape include paths, text, gradients, and more; with import available from JPG, VSD, GIF, PDF and other formats, and export to a full range of

Inkscape

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different file formats including SVG, EPS, and TEX. Like GIMP, there are many different tutorials available online to learn this software. Alternative to: Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw. Scribus Scribus is a powerful desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex and colourful page layouts like brochures, newsletters, and posters, which are often needed in assignments. This makes it excellent both for creating presentations as well as professional business documents for applying for further studies or work. If you are struggling to use MS Word or PowerPoint to create one of these types of projects, then you should try Scribus instead. Scribus supports professional publishing features such as CMYK colours, spot colours, ICC colour management and versatile PDF creation. Scribus has many unexpected touches, such as powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of colour blindness or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX (see #14: LyX) or Lilypond. Alternative to: Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress

also Math which is handy for use in mathematics subjects and Base which is like the Microsoft Access database program. While files are automatically saved to .odt format, each application in LibreOffice can output files to the relevant Microsoft extension. This means for a text document in Writer, you can save it as .docx, so it will load easily on Microsoft Word. This is perfect for if you have an assignment that needs to be submitted in a particular format. Alternative to: Microsoft Office, WPS Office WordWeb Sick of typing in and looking up definitions and synonyms on your browser/dictionary all the time? WordWeb is a handy utility that quickly provides you the definition, example usage, synonyms, and antonyms of any given word, as well as readable and audible pronunciations (for many words). The application stays running in the background on your computer and can be activated by holding down CTRL and right-clicking on a word in almost any program. The application also gives you the option to quickly cross-reference Wikipedia and other online dictionary references. WordWeb allows you 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

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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 While there are plenty of free notetaking tools out there, such as Evernote or Google Keep, Simplenote has a few features that make it really stand out. Simplenote is an easy way to keep notes, lists and ideas, which is super quick and easy and works everywhere, showing all your notes, across all your devices as well as in your browser! One of the best features of Simplenote is its revision control system, which means that you can go back and look at previous versions of your notes that you’ve since changed. You can also share with others and they can add to your notes with this application. Alternative to: Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, Evernote PDFsam Basic Working with PDF files can be a pain as they are very difficult to change. PDFsam Basic allows you to do some things with PDF files that are impossible to do just with the usual Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can use PDFsam Basic to split PDF files into a separate PDF for each page, merge two different PDF documents, mix PDF documents (combine scans of even pages that have been separated from scans of odd pages), rotate PDFs, or just pick out particular pages from a PDF file.

R Learning a programming language is one of the best skills that you can pick up in high school. Even if you don’t end up becoming a programmer, learning how to do it can teach you to look at the world (and computers!) in a different and more analytical way. R is a programming language that has been created with a specific goal in mind: statistics and graphics creation and manipulation. This makes it perfect for those times when you are supposed to be using software like SPSS. SPSS and other statistical programs are usually extremely expensive, but R is free. Of course, you won’t have to code complete statistics programs from scratch. There are plenty of R packages available that can help you along the way. Try a course on Coursera or Udemy on R to get started with this language. Alternative to: IBM SPSS, SigmaPlot, Orange QGIS If you are working with graphical geography data such as world maps, then QGIS is an indispensable tool. This software allows you to work with “geospatial data” which allows you to see the map and then add or change specific data. Using QGIS December 2018

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you can edit, manage, analyze and import/export data. QGIS supports both vector and raster layers and works with many other geographic data software. Alternative to: Esri ArcGIS, Surfer yEd Graph Editor Creating visually appealing diagrams has been notoriously difficult to date. yEd Graph Editor changes all that by providing powerful yet simple and intuitive software that helps users to create flow charts, network topographies, top-down charts, UML diagrams, and more. With it, you can create all those charts for your assignments and presentations that are way too tricky and fiddly using other tools. The software has a drag and drop interface with a selfadjusting feature that can automatically organize the parts into clean positions, so you don’t have to spend hours trying to make everything look perfect. You can even import data from Excel and output to a number of formats including PDF, GIF, JPG, and Encapsulated PostScript. Alternative to: Lucidchart, draw.io, Dia Veusz Need to plot data – either 2 dimensionally or 3 dimensionally? Veusz is the tool that allows you to do it easily and for free. The tool features a beautiful and simple to use interface, where you can make manual adjustments on any graph. Import data from text files, CSV, HDF5, binary and other sources and create complex 2D and 3D plots for modelling statistical data. The plots that you create can be point or line, plus 2D data can be modelled as bar graphs, box plots, stacked plots, contour plots, and more, and are available in either black and white or colour. These can then be exported to EPS/PDF/PNG/SVG/EMF. Alternative to: SigmaPlot, JMP, gnuplot

Veusz

ImageJ Image analysis is a complex activity. However, there is a free tool that can help achieve these goals. This software is used by scientific researchers and students to analyse, process, edit, save and print images. You can input a range of image formats including TIFF, PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP, DICOM, FITS, and raw formats. Its functionality is extended by the use of plugins that

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have been developed by the active ImageJ community, such as radiological image processing, distortion correction, image stitching and biological image analysis (via the “Fiji” ImageJ derivative). Fiji is like a supercharged version of ImageJ and comes pre-loaded with many plugins to do different types of image analysis, making it the better choice if you want more functionality. Alternative to: Image-Pro

ImageJ

LyX LyX is a word-processing software application that is based on LaTeX, which has become the choice of document production for scientists, mathematicians, and anyone looking to produce journal papers, theses, and even books. Why would you use LaTeX instead of MS Word or LibreOffice Writer? Well, Word is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor. That means what you type on the page and the formatting options you use is how the document will look if you print it. LaTeX is what’s known as a What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) editor. That means that you will see bits of code written in the document, that are used to format it only when you print, or use a viewer to see what it would look like in real life. LyX is an editor that is used to produce LaTex documents more easily, without having to write all those extra lines of code. In short, it’s everything your word processor is lacking if you are producing academic content. Getting a head start with LyX and LaTeX in high school is great preparation for university studies. Grammarly Even the best writers still make grammar errors! Grammarly is to grammar as spellcheck is to spelling. Unfortunately, grammar checkers in applications like Microsoft Word are not very advanced and miss many grammar errors. Grammarly highlights possible spelling and grammar mistakes in your text, suggests changes and provides feedback on the grammar level of what you have written. There’s an application for Windows, a Google Chrome plugin, a website, and mobile apps available, so you really can use Grammarly

anywhere. Be careful though – Grammarly isn’t always right, so check through the corrections before accepting them in your text. Alternative to: Ginger Mendeley When you are doing research assignments, it’s always important to quote your sources, and remember where they came from. This can become a bit difficult when it’s not a website you visited, but a PDF, Word document or other paper that you have come across. Rather than just saving it on your computer somewhere, you can use Mendeley to organise these documents. Think of it like a document store for your studies where you can access them from anywhere, and even quote or link to them in your assignments (using share functionality). Mendeley has a full-text search so you can find what you need easily, plus you can add virtual notes on your documents too. Many university students use Mendeley in their studies so learning this software early can be beneficial down the track, too. Alternative to: EndNote, Citavi, Zotero Calibre Need to manage your e-books? Calibre is the number one free tool for the job. Calibre is simple to use and has a range of different functions. You can convert e-books from one format to another (like MOBI to PDF), create libraries of e-books, edit e-books, and extract, create, or edit metadata (like Title, Author) of each book. There’s searching and sorting, plus you can add tags that help you to organize your collection further. Once books are converted to the right format you can download to your Kindle or e-reader. There’s also a sharing function so others can enjoy your e-books.

brightness and more. Save images and share easily with PickPic. The application also makes it very easy to set up hotkeys if you find yourself using particular functions often. Hotkeys are keyboard shortcuts – like CTRL+V for paste instead of right-clicking then paste. By defining your own hotkeys for PicPick you don’t need to do so much clicking to take advanced screenshots. This software is free for personal use only. Alternative to: Greenshot Google Drive Cloud storage is a necessity these days, especially when you have so much important school work saved. Whether you accidentally delete files for good or you drop a drink on your laptop which breaks your hard drive, you need a backup. Google Drive can be used to backup any files and/or folders on your computer and ensure the version stored in the Google Drive cloud is the same as the version stored on your computer. These files and folders are then available anywhere with an internet connection: smartphone, tablet, or computer, and you can share them or download them whenever and wherever you please. Google gives everyone 15GB of free storage, plus an unlimited number of photos (max 16MP) and videos (max 1080p) under Google Photos using the “high quality” setting. Alternative to: Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive CCleaner This software application is designed not to make you more productive, but to make your computer more productive. CCleaner will delete temporary and unwanted files, plus clean browser history (that’s deleting all the names and addresses of the websites you’ve visited), cookies (used to store your website visit details), file fragments (like deleted files where bits have accidentally been left), plus other unneeded application data. There are plenty of options to choose from, such as keeping your autocomplete records (such as automatically filling in your name and address on a website). Use CCleaner every so often to give your computer a tune up – like a mechanic. Once your computer is cleaned you may find that it runs faster than before and you’ve freed up a lot of memory.

Calibre

PicPick Windows screenshots can be really handy, but sometimes you need something a bit more powerful. What if you want to take a picture of a whole webpage, scrolling down? You can’t do that with Windows alone. PicPick is the screenshot tool that can help you do scrolling screenshotting and more. PicPick offers screen capture of the whole screen, a particular program, or part of the screen that you select. You can then edit screenshot pictures including adding blurring, frames, watermarks, increasing/decreasing

All the software listed here are free, powerful and packed full of features – and only the basics have been covered, there is plenty more to discover! For an in-depth look, make sure to visit the software’s website and check out an introductory YouTube video to see each in action. These days free and open source software can be just as good as (or better than!) paid software. It can take some time to adjust to a different application than the one that you are used to, so be patient and you will get there. This list is just a start for what’s out there in the world of FOSS. Dr. Vijai Dharmamony is a Research Scientist at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Xiamen University, China; Email: [email protected] December 2018

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