I've recently decided I want to do Misspent Youth as an ashcan for Gen Con, and further that I want to try to do the layout on the ashcan (though not the final book) myself (also, I'll be learning how to do it, so it might not be super-great, but I'm going to try my best).

The thing is I don't want to drop $700 on InDesign. Is there a recognized go-to for free desktop publishing software out there? If not, what about a recognized very-low-price-shareware-like one? If not, what would you regard as a good one?

Are there any good ones?

Scribus.

Now, I say this as one who is going to be able to upgrade to InDesign.  However, Dirty Secrets was laid out using Scribus, which was apparently one of the largest projects done on Scribus that the programming team was aware of.  So, yeah, we stress-tested it for you!

There's a thread around here discussing Scribus.  I'll try to dig it up for you.

Thank you kindly sir.

Here you go.

It may sound odd but you can do an awful lot of things with MS Word. I've got Word 2000 and do most of my layout with it since it is much more flexible than any publishing program. Especially if I need to add a section. Then I import it to inDesign and clean it up. It's plain jane but functional.

A good series of books is Teach Yourself Visually [insert program name here] for getting a handle on what a program can do.

Keith