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I found Scribus to be virtually unusable last time I tried it (early this year on Ubuntu and version 1.4.6 I think); it compared very badly to Microsoft Publisher in the pre-2000 era.

It wasn't very intuitive - as far as I remember you couldn't edit text on page, you had to go to a modal dialogue and font editing was distinctly funky. I don't think it was possibly to flow text between multiple text boxes in the layout. Stuff like that.

I often see it recommended so I guess I'm missing something - would anyone like to sing its praises to me?

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I haven't found Scribus intuitive at all either, but if you have to create an image-heavy multi-page publication, I can't see any open source tools that would do nearly as well.

LibreOffice gets sluggish when you add too many images, and sometimes the images start to dance around a bit. Inkscape doesn't do multi-page. With GIMP you'll have to faff too much with image resizing and it's easy to end up with a result in sub-optimal quality (because the editing is destructive), whereas with Scribus you can leave the images in their full-quality, resize/move around and afterwards just export it in the DPI you want when done. Scribus will even warn you if one of your images is in too low resolution, when exporting, which makes it harder to accidentally all the pixels.

Scribus is incredibly light on memory (as it is easy to decrease the preview quality of images) and has good tools for alignments and guides (unlike LibreOffice, but similar to Inkscape).

Scribus may not be exactly what you need, but if you find yourself fuming at one of the other graphic design tools, it might be time to fire up a Scribus tutorial.

Scribus is just somewhat unintuitive. It can flow text between as many frames as you like.

I'm not a professional with InDesign by any means, but used it quite a bit for the school newspaper in high school circa '04 and supported other folks using it in college and pretty much everything we did with inDesign at the time is quite possible with Scribus.

It's been a few years since I really did anything with it, but the main things I remember being irritating are a UI model without dockable components and it being vastly better to input some things from the keyboard rather than trying to do them with a mouse.