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Some of you might know that I was in the hunt for a decent mspaint alternative recently. Note that I didn’t go for GIMP / Inkscape etc because they were overkill for what I wanted to do. Many a times, I just wanted to touch up a screenshot or make a simple flow image by drawing a few boxes, use a few pointing arrows, and add some text here and there. All this could be done with the previous mentioned programs as well but took a bit more steps than I wanted (stroking the selections / paths for lines, boxes, circles, and even then, no arrows). I didn’t find an adequate replacement at the time but got it now, so thought of writing about it. Basically I came across 4 apps: tuxpaint, gpaint, kolourpaint and mtpaint. Won’t discuss tuxpaint here cuz I found it a little too kiddish.
- gpaint: (Available in Ubuntu repositories) gpaint is a very simplistic program that has a mspaint look and feel but feels a bit lacking. It can do basic procedures like basic shape selections, lines, boxes but that’s it. No polygon selections, brush, color picker, etc, and yeah no arrows. Moreover, it saves only in pngs.
- kolourpaint: (Available in Ubuntu Repositories) kolourpaint is very close to mspaint. Infact it does a bit more than mspaint. It has all the things that I mentioned as missing in gpaint, plus has basic image manipulation effects as well. I liked it quite a bit, but it had 2 drawbacks for me, still no arrows, and it depends on KDE/Qt libraries.
- mtpaint: (Available in Ubuntu Repositories from Gutsy onwards. Rest of the folks can search for a package on net, or find a suitable package or source here) This is the software that got me most excited. It is actually a kind of lower-intermediate package that lies somewhere between mspaint and a very basic, poor man’s GIMP. It has all the features ok kolourpaint, (plus arrows at last
), a small smattering of basic effects (gaussian, edge detection, blur, embossing), can work with gifs also (handles transparency and animation quite well). So, this is the one I would be sticking to for now.
I am using mtpaint now for my basic needs. Hope the article benefitted you as well. If I missed out on some package, then do let me know.
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Quote of the day: “Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.” - Leonard Bernstein
May 1st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Hey there Shantanu,
Thanks for the comment ( http://www.quadronyx.com.au/blogs/fallen/2006/05/29/windows_best_application_mspaint_for_lin#c1285 )! I still agree that mtpaint is the best choice, providing a nice balance of features and simplicity. As hinted to in my blog, I don’t use KDE at all and therefore don’t want all the stuff that comes with kolourpaint.
I think it’s worth noting that the gimp is an “image manipulation” program, and therefore it’s primary use is that. I don’t know about you but I find it hard to draw a stick figure in the gimp, compaired with these paint apps!
Good write up.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Todd: I’ve the same situation with GIMP. It’s great for image manipulation, but hard to do normal “paint” stuff as it takes a few steps to do the same thing which could have been achieved with a single step in these paint programs.
May 1st, 2008 at 5:26 pm
What do you mean by ‘arrows’?
Testing KolourPaint right now. For a 1072KB program (Which is already too big in size), I need to download a total of 19.2MB data to get the KDE Library (I’m on Kfce).
May 1st, 2008 at 5:40 pm
@Pie:
By Arrow, I mean the “pointer” thingies with which you can point towards things, something like the connectors between boxes of a flowchart.
And about kolourpaint, KDE libraries is indeed the primary reason why I didn’t go for it. Did you try out mtpaint? It can be found at http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/
May 1st, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Turned out KolourPaint is better for people migrating from Microsoft Paint or other pixelart editor. A similar and simple interface simply means no re-learning.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Ah, arrow-shaped clipart? Maybe it’s not MSPaint replacement you’re looking, but Microsoft Visio.
As for glitter effects etc, never used it but i take it as graphic editor feature, not pixelart editor.
Yes I have tried all three, but KolourPaint simply gets the job done, especially for people who just migrated from “The Big Monopolist”.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:32 pm
@pie: I just gave the flow chart reference as an example, and I don’t need any arrow-shaped clipart, just simple arrows like the line tools.
)
I primarily wanted them to annotate pics/screenshots, or pretty simple diagrams made to explaing a simple point. That said, as previously mentioned, I don’t have much of an issue with Kolourpaint apart from its KDE/Qt dependencies (though similar things could be said about mtpaint by a KDE user who doesn’t want gtk dependencies
July 13th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Nice post!
Quick question, I installed gpaint and it does all I normally need, gimp is not that friendly. Only one thing I am not seeing… how to save as jpg? I do not get the option, however, I can save the undo versions as jpg? Strange… may be I am missing something very basic
Regards! Christian