Tek Review

October 17, 2007 by Dude

1. Type-setting and office

- OpenOffice
Is a complete Office suite package including Writer, Presentation, Spreadsheet, Drawing, and Database applications. It is well suited to academic applications. The features of particular importance are built-in bibliography utility, possibility to export the Text files as LaTeX, BibTeX, MediaWiki, and XHtml, built-in pdf export capability, and good document formatting.
-LaTeX and MikTeX (for Windows)
LaTeX is a powerful mark-up language for writing papers, scientific reports, theses, and so on. It is based on the TeX system originally developed by Donald E. Knuth. LaTeX is super-powerful in writing and managing any sort of academic writing. As a mark-up language, it can be called a programming language for academic writing. Like many programming systems any LaTeX typesetting system should have a compiling component and an editor. Although normal plain text editors can be used for LaTeX typesetting, specialized LaTeX editors are also available. Most Linux distributions come with some sort of TeX system. MikTeX can be used for Windows. There is a huge ecosystem around LaTex and many things related o TeX can be freely downloaded from Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN).
- Kile
Kile is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for development of LaTex documents in Linux. It is based on KDE desktop environment. For screenshots of Kile see here.
-TeXnixCenter
A feature-rich LaTeX editor for Windows freely available under GPL license.

2. Bibliography and reference management

- Bibus
Bibus is a bibliography and citation management software designed to be Open Source, free, and integrative to OpenOffice and MS Word. Bibus is available for Linux and Windows but Mac support is limited at the moment. It can be downloaded from here. Bibus can import and export from EndNote/Reference Manager and also RIS files. For screenshots of Bibus check this link.
- Jabref
It has LaTeX bibliography files (BibTeX files) as its native file format and can be used for management, manipulation, and export of BibTex files. Jabref is maintained for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It can directly search and download from some bibliographic databases. Screenshots can be accessed here.
- Zotero
Zotero is a Firefox browser extension which can be used for storing bibliographic data while browsing. It can be used for managing and citing as well and can save a lot of time particularly the time spent for collection of data. It works with many websites. Read this nice article about how to use Zotero to manage OpenOffice bibliographies.
- There are more Open Source bibliographic management softwares than these three. Read this Wikipedia article about comparison of different proprietary and Open Source reference management softwares.

3. PDF and Postscript related apps

- PDFedit
PDFedit is a great free and Open Source pdf editor for Linux. Read my previous post about editing pdf files with Linux to find more about PDFedit.
- Ghostscript
Ghostscript is an application written mainly in C for viewing ps and pdf files, converting ps files to pdf, and much more. This is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
- PDFCreator
It is a free and Open Source pdf creation application based on Ghostscript. This is available only for MS Windows but Vista is not currently well supported. However, the Vista bug is being fixed. PDFCreator was selected by the OpenCD project for creation of pdf files in Windows.
- Wanna more pdf apps (Open Source and proprietary) ? Check this link.

4. Math and computing

- Scilab
Scilab is a free and Open Source technical computing language. It’s syntax and application is very similar to MATLAB and if you already know MATLAB you wouldn’t have much difficulty switching to Scilab. It comes with a number of toolboxes and new applications can be easily added as interfacing with Fortran, Tcl/Tk, C, C++, Java, LabVIEW is possible. Downloadable binaries are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
- SciPy
SciPy and NumPy are two scientific computing and numerical analysis packages based on Python. NumPy provides the basic computational capabilities and SciPy is built on top of NumPy to provide a wider range of capabilities. For screenshots of the package see this and this pages.
- SAGE
SAGE is an Open Source mathematics application which is based on Python. Since SAGE is based on Python, the mathematical capabilities of SAGE can be combined by other general capabilities of Python to make more useful things. Interfacing with a number of non-free packages (such as Magma, Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, and MuPAD) as well as free packages (such as Axiom, GAP, GP/PARI, Macaulay2, Maxima, Octave, and Singular) is possible. Here you can try SAGE online. SAGE can be integrated with some web browsers.
- Octave
GNU Octave is a high-level computational language which is similar to and mostly compatible with MATLAB. It is licensed under GPL license and is available for different platforms.
- Many other technical and scientific computing languages are also available. For other free and non-free alternatives see here, here and here.

5. Graphics and illustration making

- The GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is an application for photo retouching and manipulating which is similar to non-free software Photoshop. It is available for many platforms including Linux and Windows. In Ubuntu Linux, GIMP is installed by default.
- Inkscape
Inkscape is a free and Open Source vector image editor. It is similar to non-free software Adobe Illustrator which is being widely used also by scholars to make scientific and educational illustrations. It has many advanced capabilities and is getting even better very rapidly.

Labels: Open Source