I’ve been playing around with Scribus for about two weeks on and off. It’s a fairly decent program. I’m definitely still deep in the learning phase with this software, but I have enough under my belt that I’ve started to throw some things together to see how it looks. Here’s a link to a PDF (1.7 MB) if you’re interested in taking a look.
Comments are welcome. This is the unedited text, without stat blocks (which I’m still working on), and without full-res graphics, so don’t take this as a final version.
The background texture in the layout test is from http://www.myfreetextures.com/. I’ve been really stunned at the sites I find recently that are actually legit despite their names.
So far I’m happy enough with Scribus that it might be able to replace InDesign for me down the road. Smaller documents like I’m making here will definitely work. They also help me build up to larger documents. It’s a large investment of time to learn new software… but Adobe’s “rental” payment scheme has become an unacceptable monetary outlay for me.