Desktop Publishing is a class of software that has lost a lot of its relevance as print became marginalized over the last thirty years. It's easy to forget that

Desktop Publishing is a class of software that has lost a lot of its relevance as print became marginalized over the last thirty years. It's easy to forget that print used to be the #1 way to publish information. Most companies and people had no way to target radio/tv with their information and the internet was not really a thing yet. The only thing you could do was spread information in paper form and the attention for eyeballs was fiercely competitive. So, it was something that people payed a lot of attention to. Posters, pamflets, booklets, books, magazines, etc. Early web publishing was actually desktop publishing software adapted to the web. I remember dealing with web designs that were done in photoshop where our job was converting those layouts into frame and table based implementations. That's why CSS is such a convoluted mess. It tried to bridge the gap and confronted web designers targeting screens with units that make a lot more sense for print than they do for the a screen with dimensions measured in pixels. Until CSS, em, rem, etc. were not things that people designing graphical user interfaces concerned themselves with a lot. Unless they were creating desktop publishing software. Likewise notions of padding and margins are of course lifted straight from that world as well. The notions that they can go negative (!!) and can be set to "auto" were hacks to deal with the fact that screens don't have fixed dimensions that you can plan for, unlike paper. Likewise, absolute and relative positioning were hacks as a well. People still use that stuff but it leads to very brittle hard to maintain layouts. The subtle implementation differences between browsers make this even harder. Of course, despite being rooted in this stuff, CSS is not actually that commonly used for print. You can do print with CSS and people have done so but it's just not that widely used for print and probably a far too limited for professionals working in that space. I find it interesting that I had never even heard of Scribus. That's how niche this stuff has become. Unless you really need something like it, you'll never come across it. I don't think I've used anything like it in close to 20 years. I wrote my Ph D. thesis in Adobe Framemaker. That was a mistake as that particular version is now a combination of obsolete and obscure, which means I can no longer open the files I created. I'd probably need an emulator and the exact version of the software I used at the time. Luckily, I have a pdf and no actual need/desire to actually revise the text.