@rheall @AesAthena

Scribus
http://www.scribus.net

@salixlucida @rheall I'm still a little hesitant because of the rumors it doesn't do novel-length stuff so well...But I'm fed up with Adobe and the other options are unknokwn/unavailable so I think this'll be it.

@untzag
From what I've read about LaTeX, my reaction is....eggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh. (And I'm not the only one. Just read an article today where alternatives were listed, and they're like NOOO NOT LATEX).
I think it's because I already code the book once for eBook pubbing. I can only handle so much code in my brain at a time! %P
I did look into it, tho. :3

@AesAthena if it's mostly text, pandoc might be able to get you most of the way to a working LaTeX file

good luck with your book I'm curious what you decide to use

@JoeCallanan That still sounds like quite an achivement!

@AesAthena Yeah I don't remember having any stability problems, worth having a try anyway.

@JoeCallanan @AesAthena I've used Scribus to design a billboard once. It wasn't a long document, but a rather large one, stability was fine though.

@ChrisWere @JoeCallanan That's good to know! I've heard over and over (including on the 'Scribus success stories' page over on the wiki - https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Success_stories_2017 , Look for "Maya and the Book of Everything") that in a novel-length document, it will hang. One workaround I heard was to do every chapter + front and back matter separately, then stitch the PDFs together. Might consider it!

@mray Good to know! Thank you! Did you make each chapter a separate PDF and then "stitch" them together with another program? That's the current workaround I hear you have to use.

@AesAthena No, I didn't. Only the cover was a separate huge bitmap. You can throw the desired amount of content into a dummy document and see what happens!

@suetanvil Yup! Love that site. :3 I might wind up using Scribus, at least there are some vid tuts that seemed comprehensible.