14 DAY TRIAL // After several years of hard work, the Scribus Team has recently been proud to announce the immediate availability for download of Scribus 1.5.0 for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
With more than 1,000 bugfixes and numerous new features on board, Scribus 1.5.0 has been finally ported to the next-generation Qt 5 framework (Qt 5.4 or higher is required), bringing you a modern graphical user interface. Additionally, the file format of Scribus has received a complete overhaul, which means that files created in Scribus 1.5.0 are not compatible with previous versions of the application.
Prominent features of Scribus 1.5.0 include revamped user interface, support for storing bitmap images within its file format, a new clone feature similar to the one from the Adobe Illustrator software, support for moving and combining objects without grouping them, new text features, fully editable Inline Objects in text frames, support for "real" tables, including table styles.
Scribus 1.5.0 also comes with a new plugin that enables asset management for graphics files, support for mesh gradients and other advanced gradient types from the XARA Designer and Adobe Illustrator apps, initial support for drop shadows, configurable image cache, as well as a high number of new or revamped import filters.
Scribus 1.6.0 will be the next stable release of the software
Scribus 1.5.0 is also the first version of the software to support opening of DTP files from programs like Adobe InDesign XML (IDML), Adobe PageMaker (P65, PMD), Adobe InDesign Snippets (IDMS), Apple iWorks PAGES, QuarkXPress Tags (XTG), Microsoft Publisher (PUB), Xara Page & Layout Designer (XAR), and VIVA Designer (XML). Support for the Open Raster (ORA) standard for complex bitmap files has been introduced as well.
Among other interesting features, we can mention better support for importing Adobe Illustrator and OpenDocument graphics files, support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) layers, support for importing native CorelDraw and Microsoft Visio files, several new import filters, support for importing GIMP's XCF file format and PGF bitmaps, support for importing 3D objects, as well as support for exporting files to the PDF/X-4 and Microsoft's XPS formats.
Download Scribus 1.5.0 for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia. Please keep in mind that the Scribus Team has declared this version unstable and available for testing purposes only, so you can have a taste of what's coming in the next stable release of the software, Scribus 1.6.0.