Many free desktop publishing software downloads are fine for a specific task, such as labels or business cards, but they aren’t full-featured design tools. However, a few free programs for Windows have powerful publishing capabilities, including page layout, vector graphics, and image editing. The three listed here are some of our favorites.

Scribus is a free desktop publishing application with many of the features of pro packages. Scribus offers CMYK support, font embedding and subsetting, PDF creation, EPS import/export, basic drawing tools, and other professional features.

Scribus works in a similar way to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress with text boxes, floating palettes and pull-down menus, but without the high price tag. As great as free is, this may not be the software for you if you have no prior experience with desktop publishing software and don't want to spend time on the learning curve. If you do, however, there are plenty of tutorials available to help you get started.

Inkscape is a popular, free, and open-source vector drawing program that uses the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. You can use Inkscape to create text and graphic compositions, including business cards, book covers, flyers, and advertisements. Inkscape is comparable in capabilities to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. It is a graphics program that is more flexible than a bitmap photo program for performing many desktop publishing page layout tasks.