I have described Adobe Photoshop as the Perfect Application. No application that I have worked with does its job so well as Adobe Photoshop. While Adobe Photoshop is the perfect application for someone whose career or hobby is working with photographs, the cost might be too high for someone who only occasionally needs to edit a photograph for a newsletter.

I am a big fan of OpenOffice. I use OpenOffice for all my business documents. My Thai Staff use OpenTLE and PlaDao which are essentially a Thai enhanced versions of OpenOffice. OpenOffice has graphic editing capabilities that are not found in Microsoft Office. The problem is figuring out how to access these capabilities. Here in Thailand, there are a number of books on OpenTLE and PlaDao in Thai. Either of these books will be sufficient for your Thai Staff to figure out what capabilities OpenOffice provides.

There is a very good book for OpenOffice users called the OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit. This book is written by Solveig Haugland and Floyd Jones. The authors have their own website.

My wife edits our daughter’s school newsletter. I am amazed at the investment in software just to this small document. Everything that she does could be done for free using OpenOffice. My wife complains that one of the reasons she has to work so hard on this newsletter is that the learning curve to master the software packages she uses is too steep to train any new people. I have found that OpenOffice, PlaDao and OpenTLE are sufficient for all the desktop publishing I do. I continue to suggest to my wife that the school should simply switch to OpenOffice.

OpenOffice integrates its own drawing program and it also has the ability to edit images as well. OpenOffice features a Gallery where you can store frequently used graphic images, such as logos and product photos, and easily drag these into your document.

If your image editing needs go beyond what is provided by OpenOffice, you can always use WinGIMP. WinGIMP is a windows port of the popular GIMP image editing package that comes with most Linux distributions. You can either download WinGIMP for free or buy WinGIMP commercially.

If you know how to use Adobe Photoshop, then you already know how to use WinGIMP. WinGIMP is nearly feature for feature compatible with Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is more polished, looks nicer but for most circumstances, WinGIMP can be considered a near clone of Adobe Photoshop.

If you need a free graphic viewer, an excellent one can be found at Irfaniew. It has many advanced editing features such as the ability to convert from one graphic format to another as well as the ability to resize your images and do some basic editing. Another option that is available for multiple platforms is Image Magick which can be downloaded here.

A popular commercial package for generating diagrams and charts is Microsoft's Visio. Visio is a very powerful package with predefined ICONs that is quite popular. A very similar capability is available for free using the program DIA. DIA also comes with most Linux distributions but is also available for Microsoft Windows. When you run DIA on windows, there will be a second window displaying messages. Just ignore that window or minimize it. If you close the window, you will also close DIA. The Windows installer for DIA can be found here.

If your drawing requirements need CAD or 2D drafting, an open source package called QCAD is available. QCAD is available here.

To complete our free and open source drawing toolbox there is a package that compares with Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. The package is Sodipodi. To use Sodipodi, you will need to download a language called Python. Python can be downloaded here, and Sodipodi here.