Before forking hundreds in subscription fees or outright purchases, I suggest people first try Scribus, a capable alternative to Adobe Indesign.
Other quality opensource software in this field are Inkscape, GIMP, Krita.
I haven't worked in Scribus or Krita, but while Inkscape and GIMP are fine and free, they are _far_ from professional applications. The workflow and GUI in GIMP are particularly bad. I was one of the many graphic creatives that was forced to switch from Quark in the nineties. Learned to love InDesign after a while, but the lost productivity cost us a fortune.
On the low end of things Pages is a very nice wee application, however, there were many really useful features in iWeb that should have made it into Pages. It's a shame the iWeb team wasn't absorbed into the Pages team to bring them along. Heck it's a shame iWeb was simply taken to the next level but that's another story.
What? Why? Pages has nothing to do with web design.
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I was one of the many graphic creatives that was forced to switch from Quark in the nineties. Learned to love InDesign after a while, but the lost productivity cost us a fortune.