Scribus 1.5 Released, Ported To Qt 5 With Big UI Overhaul Coming

Written by Eric Griffith in Desktop on 26 May 2015 at 09:00 AM EDT. 1 Comment
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A few days ago the Scribus team quietly tagged Scribus 1.5.0 in SVN. This release is a preview / testing release, but it provides an interest look at the next stable release: 1.6.0. No release date or schedule is known for 1.6.0. For those uninformed, Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing suite.

The biggest features of 1.5.0 include porting the UI over to the Qt 5 tool-kit. As such, Scribus now requires Qt 5.2 or higher to run. Additionally, the file format has gotten completely overhauled -- so any files created in the new version will not be compatible with previous versions.

Features of the 1.5 / 1.6 are going to include a partially revamped user interface, a revamped preferences / document setup, a modified context menu to use less screen estate. The UI transition has not been completed in full yet, and the Scribus Team is going to work on having the entire UI ported over before the 1.6 release.

Another feature of note is that Scribus finally has support for real tables. Previously tables were nothing more than combined text frames, now they are their own unique object with proper support, and the ability to implement table styles. Additionally drop shadows has been implemented, though the feature is marked experimental. Further more there is increased compatibility with Adobe Illustrator and XARA Designer for mesh gradients.

Along the lines of increased compatibility: the PDF importer has been rewritten from scratch and can now reliably open almost every PDF file directly with the original layout still intact. Further more for the first time in its history, Scribus 1.5.0 can open / import files created by other DTP programs, namely: Adobe InDesign XML (IDML), Adobe InDesign Snippets (IDMS), Adobe PageMaker (P65, PMD), Apple iWorks PAGES, Microsoft Publisher (PUB), QuarkXPress Tags (XTG), VIVA Designer XML, and Xara Page & Layout Designer (XAR)

Further features can be found on their Wiki. Features will continue to be added, fixed, or overhauled on the road to 1.6.0. There's also a bit more detail on the 1.5 release schedule page.

Scribus 1.5 downloads are only available right now through the SVN repository.
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