Scribus Open Source Desktop Publishing

I need to layout documentation, in a book form. I'm going to be picky about the formatting and I've palyed around a little with abiword and openoffice.org . This looks like a suitably powerful package, question is how fast can I finish the project with a new learning curve?

Scribus :: Open Source Desktop Publishing for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.