In "Tweaking Text in Scribus," I briefly described the tools available for manipulating text in Scribus.

Scribus is designed for quality printing. Unlike a word processor, its output is not meant simply to be good enough for practical use, but to be fine-tuned until it is as close as possible to what you want. For this reason, printing is considerably more complicated in Scribus than in the office applications with which you may be familiar.

If you don't include master pages (which are really styles under another name), then Scribus supports three types of hierarchial styles: lines, character, and paragraph. As in any other self-respecting word processor or layout application, these styles allow you to apply detailed sets of formatting options quickly, without having to change each instance of a formatting option individually.