From LQWiki

oodraw is part of the OpenOffice.org office suite.

It supports many types of embeded objects, and feels almost exactly like MS Publisher

Shortcomings

chart objects are lame, one cannot link a spread sheet to a graph for reporting... The work arround is to keep the chart in the spread sheet.

I haven't found the text flow object for a while, but I'm pretty sure that i saw it there. (method to produce columns and easy to maintain multi page articles)