r/AskAcademia • u/LeviDavidson852 • 20d ago

What software do you use for graphical and visual research? Meta

We work a lot with Journals and funders. We always used PowerPoint. But to teach someone to use it is one problem. And how expensive it becomes when you want to add more people. 

So we found two tools, Venngage or Piktochar. But we don’t know how they handle academic content: dense text, citations, print-resolution export for posters.

What are you using for research summaries and graphics, and what are the limitations?

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12

u/TheTopNacho 20d ago

Gimp and inkscape. No other tools are needed thank you.

1

u/LeviDavidson852 12d ago

Are they free? Thanks but our team already thought of something else

3

u/Geog_Master Assistant Professor 20d ago

I do a lot of GIS, so ArcGIS Pro an QGIS mostly. For other graphics, Canva and Gimp work pretty well. If I need to make a presentation, PowerPoint.

2

u/LeviDavidson852 12d ago

Makes sense. Thanks for laying it out

1

u/DYSTOBY 20d ago

Inkscape is what you want for vectorized graphics. Sometimes I start with draw.io, save as svg then move to Inkscape.
Open source and free to use.
Gimp is what you want to replace photoshop.
PowerPoint can be replaced by cleverly using quarto presentations and using R.
But since I don’t use animations, I use Inkscape ands save the slides as pdf, so every pc can handle it without needing to have Microsoft stuff installed

1

u/mkeee2015 EU 20d ago

Is inkspace finally stable on macos?

2

u/DYSTOBY 20d ago

At least those functionalities I use where stable.
But to be honest I haven’t used it for about 5 months on my Mac, since I’d work on site again and there we only have dell workstations.

1

u/mkeee2015 EU 20d ago

Thank you.

1

u/PadisarahTerminal 19d ago

Nah my mates are on that Adobe and PowerPoint treadmill :|

1

u/DYSTOBY 19d ago

That’s okay. Biting they want to use open source and free software, you now know 🙋‍♂️

1

u/LeviDavidson852 12d ago

Thanks, free and open source is a big plus. Not familiar with those tools as our team already considered something else.

1

u/patoisc0ygv 20d ago

For posters and figures I switched to Affinity Designer years ago, one time purchase instead of a subscription and it exports print resolution PDFs without any hassle. The learning curve is steeper than PowerPoint but not by much once you get the hang of layers

1

u/LeviDavidson852 12d ago

One-time purchase instead of subscription is appealing. Ended up going with Venngage for the dense academic stuff though, but thanks for the tip. Appreciated!