KOffice, The GIMP and more…
Note: This article appeared in Indus, the online journal brought out by the India chapter of the Society of Technical Communication (STC). The original link is here.
Free Tools for Documentation
There are scores of free software tools that technical writing practitioners can use to their advantage. In this article, we list just a few of them—leading projects that you can begin using straightaway!
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is an office productivity suite complete with a word processor (OOo Write), spreadsheet (OOo Calc), presentation tool (OOo Impress), graphics tool (Draw), database tool (Base) and a tool for editing complex equations (Math). Evolving initially as a ‘lightweight’ version of StarOffice (a commercial office suite), OOo has grown to get a life of its own. Releases for all major platforms (including Windows) can be downloaded from www.OpenOffice.org, the official website of the project.
For the technical writer, OOo offers a strong style-based document-design environment. It scores high on interoperability and can work with all common file formats. The Export to PDF feature has long been integrated into the OOo user interface (unlike MS Office, which has begun offering this via a free plug-in only recently—in its 2007 edition). Compared to Office, OOo also offers a more unified user experience, which means you can click open a spreadsheet or a database even within OOo Write, primarily a word processing tool.
While OOo is not an MS Office clone, it has traditionally tried to match it feature-by-feature. Now that the bar in the office suite segment has been raised by the release of Office 2007, it will be interesting to see how the OpenOffice community beefs up its strategy.
AbiWord
AbiWord is your no-frills word processor. Lean and multi-platform, it helps you design many common types of documents—letters, memos, reports, press releases, fax cover-sheets, etc. AbiWord, like OpenOffice.org, can read and save documents in MS Office formats. Although this application is frugal on features when compared to MS Word and OOo Write, it hogs up less system resources, offers a style-based document design environment and is quite intuitive to work with.
The AbiWord project is under active development, and new releases are frequently made available at http://www.abiword.org.
KOffice
KOffice is a full-featured office suite that comes integrated with KDE, a desktop environment that runs on Linux and some other UNIX-like operating systems. KOffice comprises the KWord word-processor, KPresenter for creating and editing presentations and KSpread for working with spreadsheets. KOffice can work XML and an assortment of formats, including .doc, .xls and .ppt.
The GIMP
The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Tool) is a lot like its name—classy, whacky and full of life. Beneath a user interface that is deceptively simple (you may reduce it to a quarter-window, if you are a minimalist), it offers a host of rich features that let you create and modify images in almost all popular formats. Free and lightweight, The GIMP could give expensive proprietary tools like Photoshop a run for their money. And yes, it doesn’t even keep you waiting for eons while it loads up!
There are numerous handy plug-ins and wizards that you could use with GIMP. So give your company’s logo that Chrome finish if you desire, or use the built-in wizard to create buttons for your webpage! The package benefits from some excellent documentation, and has a pretty-useful Tip of the Day feature that ensures you learn a new trick everyday. GIMP is also perfect for grabbing snapshots of the entire screen or a window—either current or a few seconds into the future. Check out Figure 3 for a quick look at the UI of The GIMP. GIMP is an application developed in GTK (The GIMP Toolkit), so you’ll need to install GTK before you carry on with the installation of the imaging tool. Grab the latest version from http://www.gimp.org.
Scribus
Scribus, a fine piece of open source software, is a lot like Adobe PageMaker on the features front. This DTP application has a built-in Export to PDF feature, so you can generate production-quality documents without any hassles. Scribus offers a user experience on Linux that is close to the look and feel of leading desktop publishing tools on the Windows platform. See Figure 4, and visit http://www.scribus.net to know more about this exciting project.
UML Tools
Technical writers involved in the documentation of complex software systems often need specialized tools for creating UML diagrams. Two excellent open source tools for this purpose are ArgoUML and Umbrello. While ArgoUML has a release available for the Windows platform, Umbrello is currently available for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) on Linux and other UNIX-like systems. See Figure 5 for a snapshot of Umbrello.
The user-interface of ArgoUML deserves a special mention for its striking simplicity. The entire range of UML diagrams can be created and exported to popular image formats.
Freemind
Freemind is the perfect tool for planning projects, organizing thoughts and general brainstorming. This mind-mapping application helps you give your documentation projects a structure, and export the final schematic to an image format that you can share with colleagues.
There are also some other cool office tools that come bundled with most flavours of Linux. GNumeric is a spreadsheet application that can save spreadsheets in XML, CSV and .xls formats, to name a few. KThesaurus, Kivio (for editing diagrams and flowcharts) and Kugar (for reports) are some other KDE tools that technical writers will find useful.
| Hint: If you haven’t worked with Linux before, try using a Live CD flavour like Knoppix or PCLinuxOS to begin with. These allow one to ’sample’ the features of Linux without actually installing the OS to a hard-disk. Simply pop the CD into the correct drive, and voila! |
Where to get free software tools?
Besides the websites of individual projects, http://www.sourceforge.net maintains an up-to-date repository of open source projects. Binaries (and source code, which you might not need) for all platforms can be downloaded from Sourceforge. In addition, www.rpmfind.net makes available the *nix binaries of open source packages. If you choose to install a Linux distribution on your PC, you’ll find that many of the tools discussed here are available by default.
Contributing to the community
Contributing to the open source community isn’t just for programmers. Open source projects, like all software applications, need good documentation—even more so, since free support for OSS tools is often through user forums only. As a technical writer, one can volunteer to contribute content, participate in localization drives, suggest enhancements and bug-fixes for open source DTP projects, and, yes, spread the word. Besides helping the community, such exposure could give a lot of visibility to your work—strengthening your resume in the end.
This piece is released under the Creative Commons No Derivs license. As a whole, it may be reproduced freely in any media, as long as it is attributed to the author. Quoting excerpts for educational purposes (with attribution maintained) is permitted, as well.
Tags: documenation, free, open source, software, tools
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