Self Publishing with Open Source Software

I have always wanted to self-publish a guitar lesson book. When I looked to buy some software to do the job, though, I was surprised by the prices. Since I am not doing this kind of thing for a living, it would be hard for me to justify buying $2,400 worth of software. So, I started to look around for open-source equivalents to the big-boy's (mostly Adobe) products. Anyway, Adobe has been irritating me for quite some time with their poor user-interface for Acrobat and with their cross-platform policies for Photoshop (I have to buy a whole new version of Photoshop for use on a Mac and can't just transfer my license from the PC). So, any chance I get to avoid Adobe products, I take it.

Previously, if you wanted to do professional quality photo or image editing, Photoshop was the gold standard and cost around $700. Now, you can get The GIMP, or if you are used to Photoshop's layout, The GIMPShop porting of The GIMP. These two programs are just as powerful and produce results just as professional looking as Photoshop. Best of all, they are free! For illustration, Adobe Illustrator (another $700+ piece of software) was the best. The open source community came up with Inkscape to do basically the same things. For page layout and desktop publishing, another adobe product (FrameMaker) is the professional's choice; it costs about $800. The open source equivalent is Scribus, which looks pretty good. Music typesetting can be done with LillyPond and exported to ps or pdf for inclusion in the Scribus document.