What’s New in Scribus 1.4?

This is a cursory overview over the changes in Scribus compared to to the latest stable version 1.3.3.14.

Note that the file format has changed and is not backwardly compatible with any prior stable version (1.3.3.14 or earlier). To be precise, you will not be able to open 1.4.0 files with version 1.3.3.14 or any earlier version.

General

  1. On initial launch, 1.4 will offer to inherit the configuration data from any existing prior version, but it will store them separately, so you can run 1.3.3.x in parallel with 1.4
  2. You can install both versions in parallel and run them at the same time. The only caveat is to install them using different installation directories, e.g 1.3.3.x in /usr/local and 1.4 in /opt or $home/bin on Linux/UNIX. If you’re building Scribus from source, you can use the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH= argument to configure where Scribus should be installed. On other platforms you can determine the location during the installation process.

New in Scribus 1.4

Qt4 Port

One of the major endeavours on the way from 1.3.3.x to 1.4 was the porting to the Qt4 toolkit. Among others, it enabled a vastly better performance under Mac OS X, as well as the creation of native DMGs for OS X. Scribus 1.4 DMGs will run on OS X 10.5 or later.

Object Handling

Text and Typography

Typography:

Optical Margins
Optical Margins

Text

Vector Tools


Boolean path operations
Boolean path operations

Lines

Solid Colors, Gradients and Patterns


Replacing solid colors
Replacing solid colors

Transparency

Render Frames


Render Frame Editor
Render Frame Editor

Import Filters


Adobe Illustrator import
Adobe Illustrator import

Image Handling


The new image manager
The new image manager

Layers

Pre-press

PDF Export

Usability

Much work has been spent on major and minor usability improvements throughout the whole program, e.g.:

Templates

Help System