[Hans M Aus]

Can I recommend iWork as a reasonable (useable) alternative to full power applications such as MSOffice, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop?

Students frequently ask me if I can give them copies of the latter programs for their brand new iBooks. Departmental policy is NO but I would prefer to suggest alternatives.

In general, a student needs to:

1) Open, edit and save MSWord documents,
2) Prepare PowerPoint presentations which s/he can show on a MS PC,
3) Prepare complicated figures to be included in MSWord or PowerPoint,
4) etc.

Is iWork a reasonable (useable) alternative to full power applications such as MSOffice, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop?

(The troubles I've seen on MacIntouch are not very encouraging.)

[Randman]

For the Office products, yes. For the Adobe ones, no.

You know, the students can get edu discounts, right? While not totally legal, 3 of them could go in and get a full working set of Office.

Pages and TextEdit are Word compatible but miss a few things. Keynote can import/export PowerPoint just fine. No iWork version of Excel.

For Photoshop, there are alternatives but Photoshop Elements is reasonably priced and has everything a student would need.

[CaptainHaddock]

1. Pages (iWork) will do this fine.
2. Keynote (iWork) is way better than PowerPoint and outputs compatible files.
3. Depends exactly on what the complicated figures will be. Numerical charts would be easy to do with iWorks' Pages. Something like Omnigraffle would be good for diagrams. Illustrator and Photoshop would be too advanced for casual users.
4. Who knows.

[cleanup]

iWork cannot replace graphical software. iWork '05 comes with Pages 2 (a word processor), and Keynote 2 (presentation software). Would either of these two be likely to be able to create dynamic, layered graphics?

As Randman said, I think Photoshop Elements is the best for your students. It's about a hundred bucks a copy, and has all the essential features that people look for in Photoshop, while losing all the complexity and the pricetag. You could also try the GIMP - it's a powerful and free piece of graphics software that does many things that Photoshop can do, including manage layers.

As for Illustrator, there are free as well as inexpensive vector programs out there. Google.

[wataru]

There are a number of free alternatives to pretty much anything you might want. Try NeoOffice/J instead of MS Office, and Gimp.app instead of Photoshop. An Illustrator alternative that's easy to install is Inkscape.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by cleanup

iWork cannot replace graphical software. iWork '05 comes with Pages 2 (a word processor), and Keynote 2 (presentation software).

No, it's Pages 1.0. It's a new app. Keynote is indeed at version 2.

tooki

[cleanup]

Originally Posted by tooki

No, it's Pages 1.0. It's a new app. Keynote is indeed at version 2.

tooki

Almighty tooki has shamed me.

[budster101]

No, just politely set you straight. We can do that around here as we are indeed on the same side. Mac people for Mac.

No reason to feel shame.

[production_coordinator]

It's a fine line.

The real question is, do they need to share their end product with other people. If that answer is yes, then you should say NO. The only way to get nearly perfect Word documents is to use Word. The same goes for just about every other application.

That being said, if they just need to be able to open a handful of standard word documents (nothing fancy) to use for their own personal use. They might be able to get away with iWork or even an alternative.

As for Adobe products, the answer is generally no. There is no fully functional replacement for most Adobe products.

[wataru]

But you would be remiss in telling people not to at least try the free alternatives, since they are free. You lose nothing by trying NeoOffice/J, Gimp.app, or Inkscape.

[brettcamp]

Agreed. The new version of NeoOffice is getting real close to MS Office in functionality, and even better in some ways, and as far as I can tell is also excellent at working with MS Office files. Just the other day I brought my Powerbook down to a lecture by a friend who'd put some images on a CD. But he neglected to tell me that he'd put them in Powerpoint, and I don't have Office on my Powerbook anymore. But he double clicked on the PP icon, and sure enough, NeoOffice opened and ran his presentation flawlessly.
I'm really glad to be able to tell my students (who are already in enough debt) about a free alternative that works well regardless of their computing platform. At least give them the option of trying it out.

[Hans M Aus]

Thanks for the informative replies.

One challenge is that the professional journals require high resolution images, diagrams and graphs, some of which are quite complicated. Previously, these journals accepted only Adobe documents and are only now beginning to accept JPEG, TIFF and MS Word documents.

I've suggested to the student that he start with iWork on his iBook.

[wataru]

What would you be submitting in JPEG or TIFF form? The iWork apps are not graphics programs. Again, I recommend Gimp.app for bitmap stuff, and Inkscape for vector work.

[Hans M Aus]

I overlooked your suggestion wataru and look forward to discussing them with the lab project leader. Both he and I want to provide the students with powerful, especially legal, software tools to present their results.

The JPEG and TIFF documents include DNA gels - loads of black and gray blobs - and complex DNA sequence diagrams.

Once again Thanks and please excuse my oversight.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Hans M Aus

One challenge is that the professional journals require high resolution images, diagrams and graphs, some of which are quite complicated. Previously, these journals accepted only Adobe documents and are only now beginning to accept JPEG, TIFF and MS Word documents.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Adobe documents". Assuming these journals are printed on offset presses, the printers will require either .tiff or .eps files for continuous tone images and .eps files for vector images. Although Adobe programs support these files types, they are not "Adobe" files.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

I'm not sure what you mean by "Adobe documents". Assuming these journals are printed on offset presses, the printers will require either .tiff or .eps files for continuous tone images and .eps files for vector images. Although Adobe programs support these files types, they are not "Adobe" files.

Actually, weren't both of those formats created by Adobe?

Anyway, he probably means PDF, which are now read with Adobe Reader…

[Hans M Aus]

Many of our publications appear in the journals of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). Our staff prefers to use Adobe Illustrator because they have never had any problems and could always save the document in the required format (CMYK TIFF and EPS).

ASM provides a 16 page "Instructions to Authors", which I'll send to interested readers. Two figures on page 11 list the 13 acceptable programs for Macintosh and Windows. Five of the 13 are Adobe products. Unfortunately, all 13 programs are commercial products and none are Open Source. A footnote states that ASM accepts only graphics from Kaleidagraph, Photoshop 5.0LE, Prism and PowerPoint (http://cjs.cadmus.com/da).

Authors can check the acceptability of their files at http://rapidinspector.cadmus.com/mw.

[JKT]

The programme used to generate a .tiff or .jpeg or .eps is irrelevant - they are graphical standards that are not proprietary to any one programme. The GIMP would be more than adequate as a free replacement for Photoshop for generating such images.

<rant>WTF is PowerPoint doing in that list of programmes for generating graphics - good fscking grief!!!! It is embarrassing just how fscking clueless these scientific journals are.<end rant>

One word of caution about NeoOffice J - you may not want to include any images in it for submission as its output is currently limited to 300dpi for images owing to an issue with Java 1.3.1 on OS X. Hopefully, future versions which will be based on Java 1.4.2 will not suffer this limitation.

[JKT]

FWIW, Pages would be more than adequate as a replacement for MS Word in this instance as your submissions would only require the bare minimum of formatting (underlining, emboldening, italicising, etc) and you are unlikely to do anything more fancy that that. However, you already have a programme that will do all this for free on your Macs - TextEdit. It can save as .doc format too. However, as an all around free replacement for MS Office, your best bet is NeoOffice/J.

[Hans M Aus]

The acceptance of PowerPoint images is very new and the staff is as surprised as you are.

Many thanks for all these interesting and informative suggestions. A student is able to do his work with only legal (free) software installed on his iBook.