your regular round-up of F/OS software I used in a project

[kaberett]

I wrote the vast majority of my report under Windows using MikTeX, occasionally making reference to detexify. (I also wrote a little of it in a text editor under Debian, but that's a story for another day. ;)

I used Scribus to make a fold-out A3 page (as well as my project poster!).

I edited images using the GIMP, Inkscape and Microsoft ICE.

I created heatmaps using QuantumGIS.

I used Veusz to plot my graphs, and a synthetic data generator provided by the University of Alberta to simulate clustered data points.

OpenOffice featured extensively, predominantly in terms of spreadsheets, eurgh.


I speak a lot more LaTeX and read a little more python than I did when embarking on this particular endeavour, and I am nearly. sodding. done.

Comments

[swaldman]

Ooh, detoxify sounds wonderful. thanks :-)

[kaberett]

It really is! Enjoy :-)

[emperor]

How did you find qGIS? I may have to do some road-distance stuff for work soon, and I've not done much GIS-y at all...

[kaberett]

Better documented and much less infuriating, on the whole, than ArcGIS - which is the industry-standard $2000/licence disaster. Would definitely recommend it over Arc; I've not met anything better and I don't actively hate it. Also a plus: it's actually pretty easy to work out which keywords you need to search with in order to find the people who've gone before you in terms of trying to do the same kind of thing - again unlike Arc.

Enjoy your GISing, and also DARK, DARK LAUGHTER.

(If you're not familiar with it already, Edina Digimaps (run by Edinburgh University) is a great source of GIS-ready base-map data, including OS maps, should that happen to be relevant to you...)