For textual documents like academic work and literature LaTeX and its many packages are great for high quality typography. It has a steep learning curve though, but the results look professional and sharp if you follow the best practices. For things like beautiful tables and well-balanced paragraphs (i.e., the distribution and hyphenation of words) LaTeX is hard to beat. So if you are into typesetting books, that is a great option.

Nowadays there are plenty of good free fonts available too (although you are naturally limited). Free software fonts like Gentium are a pleasure on the eye in print.

I'm not too familiar with the more DTP side of software available as free software though.

Of course web browsers have come a long way too. Decent typography is already possible in the modern web browser, and more goodies become available all the time.