foss designing tools

I started designing/drawing using a comp in 1993 when i was in my school. i had a friend of mine who worked in a design house. They did some book publication stuff and they used Adobe Pagemaker and Coreldraw ver 4 . Bobby, my friend, let me play around with the comp when he is not using it and also offered to teach me stuff. since i was inclined to drawing, i was amused with coreldraw. I remember the excitement when i found out that i can undo my mistakes. :) which can never be done with a canvas and paint !

From then i have been using coreldraw. now its version 12. Its a great, user-friendly, intutive and undoubtedly the best vector drawing tool till date- but sadly closed source.

Of late i am more and more using gimp or inkscape. both are great tools, but i should say not as great as coreldraw. Gimp or inkscape are good for making logos, I made the foss.in logo in inkscape.
But when you are making a poster of A3 size, 300 dpi, with lot of gradients, it just cant handle.
I shall do a detailed comparitive study of coreldraw v/s gimp and post later.

Another problem is getting it printed. There are some digital printing shops, but unfortunately none use linux. and never have heard of anything like gimp.

Yea, ofcourse, I can convert from any foss tool to PDF, but not without compromising on quality when compared to printing a file from the application which was used to create it.

I dream of a day when some foss tool would stand up to other closed source ones !