Scribus is an open source desktop page layout program with the aim of producing commercial grade output in pdf and postscript, primarily, though not exclusively for linux.

scribus can be used for many tasks; from brochure design to newspapers, magazines, newsletters and posters to technical documentation. it has sophisticated page layout features like precision placing and rotating of text and/or images on a page, manual kerning of type, bezier curves polygons, precision placement of objects, layering with rgb and cmyk custom colors. the scribus document file format is xml-based. unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents, can be recovered with a simple text editor.

this is the original on-line documentation from http://docs.scribus.net reformatted for the help browser.