Choosing a layout tool, honestly

The question is what the document is

Nobody needs the “best” layout application. They need the one whose limits do not sit in the middle of their job. So start from the document.

InDesign

The industry reference, and what nearly every publishing and agency job advertisement names. Threaded text, full style system with nesting and GREP styles, tables with styles, data merge, cross-references, indexing, footnotes and endnotes, live preflight, package for output, and the best justification engine available outside academic typesetting.

Subscription only. If you are working for agencies or publishers, you will need it eventually, and there is no substitute that reads and writes .indd.

Affinity Publisher

Genuinely capable: masters, styles, threaded text, tables, data merge, and the ability to open the other Affinity apps’ tools inside it. Weaker on very long documents (indexing and footnotes arrived later than the rest and are less developed) and it cannot open .indd. It was a one-off purchase for years; after Canva’s acquisition of Serif the apps were relaunched in 2025 with free access and a paid tier for some features, so confirm the current terms rather than planning around a remembered price.

Scribus

Free, open source, mature, and it has laid out a great many real books. Its PDF/X export and colour management are the best of the free tools, which is why it is the export stage of the free press chain. Real styles, masters, threaded text, spot colours, and a preflight verifier.

The honest limits: the interface is dated and some operations take more clicks than they should; table handling is weaker than InDesign’s; there is no paragraph-level composer, so justified text is line-by-line; and complex OpenType features are less accessible. None of these stops a book.

CorelDRAW

Multi-page, paragraph styles, print merge, and an entire trade that uses it for eight-page brochures and menu cards. Its text flow model is weaker than a dedicated layout application’s, so a 96-page document is harder work than it needs to be. Up to about twenty pages it is perfectly reasonable, and it is what the shop already has.

LibreOffice Writer

Free, runs on anything, and with real paragraph styles it will produce a decent 300-page novel interior with an automatic contents list and an index. What it cannot do is press-grade colour, bleed with crop marks, or precise image placement. For text-only interiors it is a legitimate answer and it is often the right one for a self-publishing author with no budget.

LaTeX

Free. Sets the best justified text of anything on this list, handles footnotes, cross-references, bibliographies and mathematics with no effort, and produces identical output on any machine. It is the correct tool for a thesis, a technical manual or a mathematics textbook.

The cost is that visual control is indirect: you describe structure and the system decides placement, and fighting it is unpleasant. If you want to move something 2 mm to the left because it looks better, LaTeX is the wrong tool.

HTML and CSS with Paged Media

Write the content as HTML, style it with CSS including @page rules, and render it to PDF with WeasyPrint or Paged.js, both free. Page breaks, running headers, page numbers, footnotes and a generated contents list are all CSS features now.

This is the right answer when the same content must become a web page and a PDF, when the content is generated from a database, or when you want the layout under version control. It is the wrong answer when somebody needs to nudge things by eye, because there is no canvas to nudge on.

The decision, in three questions

1. Does it have to be press-grade colour with bleed? If no, Writer or LaTeX are open to you. If yes, the shortlist is InDesign, Publisher, Scribus or CorelDRAW.
2. Is it over about thirty pages with structure: contents, cross-references, an index? If yes, drop CorelDRAW.
3. Is there any budget? If no, the answer is Scribus, and it is a real answer rather than a consolation.

The one combination to avoid is a word processor producing a press PDF for a job with bleed. It does not do bleed, and every workaround is worse than switching tools.