[sf-lug] linux lay out program similar to Adobe Illustrator

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Kleider (a_kleider at yahoo.com):

> Is there a Linux alternative to Adobe Illustrator, a lay out program?
> I'd be grateful to anyone who could steer me in the right direction.

I'm really funny this way, but I tend to look first inside
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Apps/ , when I have questions like that.  ;->

(My very modest, and ill-maintained, effort is an entry called "Graphics
- Bitmap and vector graphics" on that index page.  You'll be looking for
vector-graphic aka drawing programs.  Notice at the top of the page says
"This file is just getting started, so don't expect much", and I really
do mean that.)

Your best contender, at present, is likely to be Sodipodi, Inkscape, or
Xara Xtreme.  Distant fourth place would be the OpenOffice.org Draw
functions.

More at:  http://www.osalt.com/openoffice-draw

There's are two separate but often-seen-as-overlapping categories:

o  UML modeling programs.  I'm not even going into that, but the
   osalt.com page addresses it.
o  Flowchart/network-diagram programs.  Dia and Kivio are significant
   entries here, if somewhat modest ones.

(I'm not a graphics guy, so I may be completely out to lunch.)