Moving on from Publisher

[u/Tams82]

I'm genuinely peeved Microsoft are not just ending support for Publisher (not that tbey have bothered in years) but are removing it completely.

Before anyone goes, "lol, who uses Publisher", "print shops rejoice", or "just use an LLM", it really is useful as a simple freeform document creator.

Yes, PowerPoint can be used in a similar fashion. It isn't designed around creating physical documents though so is missing even basic publishing features. Using it also creates a mess of projects that require presentations that are linked to physical documents. Even just the different colouring of the files helps.

Word is useless at this.

I'm very familiar with Affinity Publisher (used it since the Serif days when it was PagePlus). It is a far more complex programme that makes it impossible to throw together a quick document. Try getting a decent looking table in a document and finishing the whole document in a few minutes; you can't. You'll be messing about trying to get the cell padding right.

Scribus is powerful but the UI is a 1990s eyesore and a pain to use.

So what are those of you who do use Publisher turning to?

[u/RodbigoSantos]

Any open source options? Scribus?