Adobe Illustrator alternatives

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Charles Lewis
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Adobe Illustrator alternatives

Post by Charles Lewis »

Alas, but my nifty version of Adobe Illustrator 8 simply chokes at the thought of being placed on a 64 bit Vista (home) or 64 bit Windows 7 (work) machine. While CS3 and above will run on 64 bit OSs, I'm not in a big hurry to run out and spend hundreds of dollars (Illustrator CS5 goes for $600). Are there alternatives out there that would be cheaper?

EDIT: I found out through a friend of mine that OpenOffice has a drawing program that has a lot of functionality to it. I'm going to check that out, particularly since it's free. :)
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Charles Lewis
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Post by Charles Lewis »

I haven't had a chance to fully put the Draw program in OpenOffice through its paces, but on the surface it appears to have enough of Illustrator's functionality to suit my purposes. :)
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Post by Emiricol »

That's good to know. I'd really appreciate more of your thoughts as you put the program through its paces ;)
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Post by Gareth_Perkins »

If OO doesn't cut it, try something like:

http://www.xara.com/uk/

Xara is pretty good (the interface is streets ahead of illustrator anyway, even if it doesn't have quite the same functionality - then again, trained monkeys could code a better UI than adobe),
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Post by gstano »

It looks like you have some options available. However, if you are still interested in Illustrator, I have Illustrator CS2 running on a 64 bit Vista (home) machine.
It's not as bad as it turned out to be.
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Charles Lewis
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Post by Charles Lewis »

Yes, the CS series will work on a 64-bit machine. Alas, but my version is too old.

One issue that has come up so far is OpenOffice's draw automatically converts RBG color codes to CMYK codes, so if precise color matching is an issue you should be aware of that.
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