Cheap alternative to Adobe Illustrator for Mac OS X
Jul 12th, 2007 by AndieCZ
Adobe Illustrator is one of the best vector graphics editors for your work. But the cost associated with the whole Adobe Creative Suite is really too high. There are alternatives on the market to the whole Adobe Creative Suite, which offer almost the same comfort for the job, but their price is much more acceptable.
There are generally two main alternatives to Adobe Illustrator available at the moment for the users of Mac OS X:
Inkscape and its capabilities in vector graphics are covered in other articles, which can be found here, here and here. Inkscape is an open source application, natively developed for Linux and for its execution under Mac OS X; the X11 environment is needed. This brings several disadvantages. The whole application is developed intensively and the team releases a new subversion every several months.
The other possibility is application Lineform. Lineform application is developed purely for Mac OS X and is fully integrated with user look and feel of Mac OS X. You can buy the application for 79,95 USD and this price looks affordable to almost every single Mac OS X user.
Lineform vector graphics editor offers a lot features very similar to Adobe Illustrator. You cannot expect the full functionality of Adobe Illustrator, but the main features are the same and you can work with Lineform with ease and comfort.
The main features of the application include the work with arrows, bezier curves and gradients. All the features are supported on layers and you can adjust visibility of each layer separately. And what is very important. You can export the result as a CMYK picture so the communication with the printer is much easier and more comfortable.
The user interface of Lineform vector graphics editor is very similar to KeyNote and Pages applications provided directly by Apple. When you just want to start with vector graphics, it is one of the best starting point – to use Lineform.
The application offers 30-day trial period. You should try it, it can be your choise for vector graphics on Mac OS X. Lineform is an excellent alternative to Adobe Illustrator.
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Found this article after googling for illustrator alternative. Thanks for the two ideas. I can’t really afford CS.
I can’t wait to try this. Illustrator has become a bloated, expensive mess. It really hans’t improved all that much since v6.0, yet they still haven’t fixed some of the most basic deficiencies of the program. (Gee, I’m happy that I can now draw 3d globes in CS3, but I still can’t easily make selections in complex drawings, which would have been useful about 3 releases ago. The default file-saving in Illustrator is still completely f’d, too. Hate that program.)