True, framemaker was never cheap. I may also be conflating personal experience a bit with PageMaker or some other package - but I seem to recall FrameMaker was

True, framemaker was never cheap. I may also be conflating personal experience a bit with PageMaker or some other package - but I seem to recall FrameMaker was popular as a site licence as university. I did find this interesting review/preview of framemaker for Linux from 2000 - it was a beast - more than 20MB! :-) http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/1812/1/ http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/1812/1/ At any rate in the world of Free software, Scribus would probably be the dtp alternative that stands out. For something in-between, Pagestream might be worth a look. As for a commercial offering being expensive and only half-decent - that's pretty common for Free software - many Free software packages are incredible value. Things like zfs, postgresql, etc etc.