[ad_1]

Technical Writing – Top 3 Open Source Software You Can Use to Write and Design Technical Documents

I use Adobe FrameMaker and Microsoft Office on a daily basis, and Microsoft Visio, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrate on an almost-daily basis. These are the tools of the technical writing trade that I wouldn’t do without.

However, I’m also aware that these are not the cheapest software to own. What if you’re a new technical writer who is asked to create a manual but you don’t have all that expensive software to work with?

Are you going to give up? Of course not since there are many excellent alternatives to brand-name proprietary software in the market today that anyone can download for free. I’m talking about “Open Source Software,” of course.

Although I love using the proprietary software that I’ve mentioned in the first sentence, I enjoy using open source software as well since some of them are actually BETTER than the paid software if some respects.

Here are my top three open source software (for Windows) available for free on the Internet (just search with their names):

1) OpenOffice Suite (and its sister NeoOffice for Mac) is an amazing collection of office applications that can draw circles around MS Office suite.

It comes with a word processor, spreadsheet program, a personal database, a drawing program, a slide presentation program, a program to write scientific formulas, plus a host of ready-to-go templates.

NOTE: You can open all MS Word documents inside OpenOffice, do whatever you want to do with them, and then save them back as MS Word documents and nobody will know the difference! How cool is that?

2) Inkscape is my favorite open source vector drawing program that is almost as good as my beloved Illustrator.

3) GIMP is the raster image editor I use once in a while instead of the venerable Photoshop. The user interface is not as versatile but in terms of functions it’s fast catching up with Photoshop, believe it or not.

With these three totally free tools any technical writer can create any documentation without any problems. Download them today and be on your way!

[ad_2]

Source by Ugur Akinci