Do you know of Scribus, or do you not consider it a good OSS equivalent for InDesign? Last time I've worked with InDesign was around 2011, and it was meh. Scribus is also really realy meh, but gets the job done. I've got an Affinity license and have been using Designer for a bunch of projects - to me it's a toss between that and Scribus for what I do. They are totally different, but I have more experience with Scribus and therefore am much quicker in using that.
Scribus is unfortunately pretty bad and also almost dead. Its maybe interesting if you want to layout embeded LaTeX but the ux will make you hate yourself.
My wife has been using it for years. Hates it. She upgraded a while back in the hope that the latest version was better, but it sucked. First, it did a one way upgrade in the file format, and every doc she printed from 1.6 looked like trash on her printer (no other settings changed). After messing with various settings for hours she downgraded to 1.5.x, restored her old configuration and and files from backups. Old version prints as expected. It also does totally weird and broken stuff, like the other day she was creating an A4 sheet with 6 cards on it. 5 were copy/pastes of the first one, with minor changes. When she printed it, only 3 of them actually printed even though they're visible onscreen. She printed to a PDF... Same thing. She created a new doc and copy/pasted all 6 into it and printed... they all printed fine. Like WTF is even going on there?
Long time ago ive tried to help the project but really its just too complex of a problem for the few people that maintain it.
At same time its dense C++ codebase that only experienced programmers will be able to contribite to. And those programmers often dont value UX/Design much so it becomes huge rift between bunch of designers unable to do anything themselves and few annoyed programmers.
