Graphic design, desktop publishing, image management, web development?

Question

I'm a university student studying graphic design in the uk. During workshops, we are basically only taught how to use Adobe CS4 on Macs. I've been looking into what tools are available for linux, hoping to find some quirky apps for creating/editing images, page layouts, managing large collections of images, developing websites, creating motion graphics, or producing my module file, which is a large document containing research including images, text, etc.
Looking around, the same software seems to pop up - gimp, inkscape, photoshop CS2 on wine (thanks for that, google!), latex, scribus. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for software, for any of the tasks listed above? Or any individual applications which perform a single aspect particularly well? Any software which has a more interesting use / function / outcome than the standard mac or windows equivalent? Something which might set my work or workflow apart from the technologically backward point-and-click mac users?
For example, I'm currently collating all my notes as a Zim wiki, with links to my briefs as PDF files. I can import text, images, and then export a wiki site with a custom css theme to give to my tutors when assessment comes. They'll love that It's not something I'd ever have considered doing on a Windows machine.
Go!
Last edited by saft (2010-04-13 21:21:27)

Answer 1

Well I'm certainly not advanced, but I use gimp... Never felt comfortable with PS (any version). A friend of mine, on the other hand, is more comfortable with PS, but is trying out gimp after that whole fiasco about CS5 using something that gimp has had for years. For vector graphics, you don't really need anything beyond inkscape. Gimp covers creating/editing images and page layouts. For managing large collection of images, I just have the filesystem. I have a /common partition, and images go in /common/images. Then I can group certain images by "genre" I guess you'd call them. Wallpapers have their own directory sorted by resolution. I can just use something like:
% ls /common/images/wallpaper/**/*.{png,jpg}
If I needed a list of images. I could probably use awk and imagemagick to give me an html page with thumbnails.
When I write my lab reports, I use vim and LaTeX (haven't tried vim-latex yet). I can include whatever images and text I want. The text is usally split between several raw data files and the report itself. At first it may seem odd to type process instead, but after you make your own document classes, it all makes sense and you can start to really streamline everything.
For XHTML + CSS, I just use vim.