I really wanted to get more into Scribus, as its automatization features look promising as some sort of middle ground between point-and-click and layout languages, but I got both side-tracked and disenchanted by its glacial development pace.
Affinity on Windows/Mac is kinda-sorta okay. You get something a bit more predictable and print-ready than your average word processor, for a rather good price. But it’s no RPG writing panacea either, i.e. don’t expect to get good output for free. The default styles have their quirks–I notice more and more games with ugly top-justified table cells and those huge indents after list bullet points.
It’s also not really oriented towards more structured content. Which also means (non-zine) RPG content…
For programatically producing PDFs, on Linux or elsewhere, you’ve basically got three options:
- (La)Tex: Exists since the 70s and looks that way. With its default style, you get quite readable paragraphs, but we really don’t do those anyways these days in the NSR/OSR spaces
You’re lucky if someone made a template already, as then it’s quite easy to get some house style. But I’ve only seen that for D&D 5E, AD&D 1E modules and some German stuff. This family also contains ConTeXt, which is more oriented towards print output, but has no hand-holding at all. - Typst: Yochai already pointed at the local thread. It’s the new kid on the block, trying to be a bit like LaTeX, but with both new software and language to control it. The fact that a lot of people had good results producing character sheets shows that you can achieve high levels of control over your output.
- HTML: Well, a lot of people already know how to create web pages, and this allows you some good control over the output, without looking up how to do dotted borders or drop shadows in TeX. Getting a PDF either means printing in Chrome, or using a dedicated tool like the free Weasyprint.
Now, Markdown can be put before all those languages, so doing lists, italics etc. isn’t too darn complicated. I mean, that’s what we’re doing right now, I’m glad that I can just **emphasize** things and don’t have to sound like Arnold by doing <strong>emphasize</strong>. Or making text my boyfriend in TeX (\textbf{emphasizet}). The OP is generating the HTML from Markdown with the export functionality of the notepad du jour, others might use pandoc / PanWriter.
It probably wouldn’t hurt to have more templates for some of them, so the way from Markdown to something approximating what you’d find on itch these days would be shorter.