Hello Bob,While Scribus has made some progress, it is not easy to use by any measure. In the Windows arena, Affinity is the Indesign killer app. It can be installed on Linux (e.g. https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer) or run on a virtual environment. Affinity has master pages and many features a publisher would need, and it is free. Personally, I still prefer the Windows-only Xara Designer (https://www.xara.com/designerpro/v20/). They have discounted it (due to Affinity price pressure). It does it all (bitmaps, vector, page and web design), elegantly and in one interface. There is also a 20 years old free Linux version of Xara (http://www.xaraxtreme.org/download.html) but it is badly dated, of course. To overcome OS problems, there are net applications that are very powerful, like Overleaf (https://www.overleaf.com/) or Typst (https://typst.app/), and an open-source Typst compiler (https://typst.app/open-source/#download).
Best regards, Kari Eveli LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland) lexitec@xxxxxxxxxx *** Lexitec Online *** Lexitec in English: https://www.lexitec.fi/english.html Lexitec English and Finnish dictionaries: https://sk.lexitec.fi/en/ Home page in Finnish: https://www.lexitec.fi/ Bob Newell wrote:
I know some major applications are Windows only and if they are critical to your work, you have no choice. As a (very) small-time typesetter and publisher, I for one thing can't use Adobe InDesign on my Linux systems, and that's an essential tool in larger operations. (I typeset with LaTeX which would be far too slow for busy houses, although Scribus is more and more an option. InDesign is also kind of expensive!)