I'm looking for an open-source (or free) alternative to Adobe InDesign.

Scribus

He said he tried Scribus @pdworkin

Ooops, sorry.

Yeah, my big beef with Scribus is that you can’t easily create straight lines [wtf, I can’t just hold down shift?!?] and that the menus/toolbar aren’t particularly forgiving yet. Further, more “universal” keyboard shortcuts would help.

You should send RocketSquid a private message. He is a 3d animator, and knows everything about that stuff.

I have a buddy that uses xara and it might be worth checking out (but I don’t enough about InDesign to know if they are equivalent).

Unforunately, the only nearly complete one is Scribus, despite its faults. I think it’s generally sucking up the DTP developers, as there don’t seem to be any other programs out there.

There’s always LaTeX or TeX if you like torture.

Only near (and decent) substitute i am aware of is Inkscape. http://www.inkscape.org/ It’s more of an Adobe Illustrator substitute though.

There are some websites that allow you to create graphics of this kind. I think you need to clarify what particular type of document you want to end up with.

Layout. I’m talking everything from a print advertisement (so I could do certain work projects from home) to a marketing dashboard to a resume-like print document.