I seems like such a tight application. But I never had a need for it. When do you use Scribus? In which workflows or for what kind of work or deliveries? "Publishing" tells me nothing, kind of.
This is a bit like when young people express wide-eyed astonishment that bookmarks were physical objects.
"Publishing" tells you what you need to know if you know that the word as used in the internet era is a slight repurposing of a word which has a distinct pre-internet meaning.
More specifically, "Desktop Publishing" is a late 1970s, early 1980s term for packages that made it possible to do any kind of controlled-layout publishing from a computer at all.
Publishing used to be a multi-person job where layout, typesetting, and multiple other tasks where done on dedicated workspaces by seperate people.
Desktop-publishing is really that: being able to do it on the top of a single desk (as a single person).
Man, I kinda want to setup one of those giant touch screen tables and some sort of AR hybrid. Pretend I'm doing it the old way but with none of the downsides.
Sweeping scissors pantomime and minority report motions. Blank pieces of paper with different content projected unto them by... lasers, dependent on where on the table they happen to land.
Glue sticks that are actually remote control knobs.
Other tools that can print don't often offer all of these features, or if they do they don't provide as much control over them.
Specifically, it has CMYK support, allowed me to layout images and text side-by-side and/or overlapping, along with shaded backgrounds for readability and emphasis.
Most books didn't require something this heavy, but the images were a pain without it.
Basically print, with a mixture of text and images.
We use InDesign because it allows for much greater control over layout than something like PowerPoint. We want our reports and presentations (the big ones based on research) to be extremely polished.
Back in the day I heard tell of someone who did their thesis on a Macintosh (this was back when they were still Macintoshes).
Nothing to note on the surface, but the person used the program MacDraw to author it.
But Scribus is very serious about PDFs: https://www.scribus.net/category/why-scribus/
> Scribus was the first DTP program in the world that supported the demanding PDF/X-3 specification.
No idea what that is but might be worth checking out.
This is its killer feature! I've had compliments from multiple pro printers regarding my print PDFs produced with Scribus. Even though most usual PDF pipelines are Adobe based, Scribus PDF files are superior.
Notably this including things like adjusting the spacing on a particular line in order to prevent a line break, hyphenation, word wrap, or even creeping on to another page. It's not just about setting fonts and margins, but goes deeper than that.