Highlights of this version are:

• switch to Qt4 and source code refactoring;
• rendering and loading of documents speedups;
• finally, sane inline text editing;
• new object type  — render frame;
• new document view modes;
• new path editing tools;
• better linguistic tools;
• more typography options;
• much easier legal Pantone color swatches support;
• various user interface improvements;
• new and improved import/export filters;
• improved print preview;
• lots of bugs fixed and smaller improvements introduced.

I reckon I should warn you beforehand that the review is somewhat critical, but hopefully fair.

Switch to Qt4 and source code refactoring

Quite a lot of time has gone into rewriting Scribus to use a newer version of Qt — the library that provides user interface elements and some basic features. While changing the code developers couldn't help themselves rewriting a lot more, so the whole thing took a lot longer than expected.

Rendering and loading of documents speedups

Rendering speed has been improved quite a lot and the application has become more responsive. This is mostly thanks to work by new member of the team — Pierre Marchand, and a new contributor — Tomas Mečiř.

Apart from that, documents seem to be loading much faster. Some users reported that it's 4 vs. 20 seconds for some of their complex documents. You get the idea.

Tools

Sane inline text editing

If you compare the new version to any previous one, especially the misunderstanding called v1.3.4, ability to edit text right on canvas, without Story Editor, really looks like magic. You still can't believe your eyes? Yes indeed — finally you can reliably select and remove parts of text, navigate inside a text frame and type in text. Long overdue and possible now.

Render frames

This new type of objects was born as a GSoC2007 project. The idea is that such a frame can hold description of data in some markup language and some external tool will vizualize it. Right now Scribus supports:

• LaTeX
• Gnuplot
• LilyPond
• Dot (GraphViz)
• POV-Ray

Contents of a render frame can be reedited at any time later. To do it just right-click on the frame and choose Edit Source in the pop-up menu Then you'll see something like this:

In fact you can add your own visualizers. Localizable description of rendering options, where applicable, is stored in an XML file which has a rather easy syntax.

While elegant, this solution has a horrible disadvantage: rendering is always done into a bitmap file. This is perfectly fine for rendering POV-Ray, but doesn't sounds like a good idea for the rest of the data types, where vector graphics would be just fine (apparently since PDF can be embedded now, you can customize pdflatex to produce PDF and vector data). However such a frame will be printed fine.

If you need support for Unicode in LaTeX, in the source editor dialog go to Fonts/Headers tab and add "\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}" header in the Additional headers entry field.

Shape Presets

Shape tool has a bunch of new presets:

This, however, doesn't help much with absence of parametric rectangle/ellipse drawing tools.

Polygon

Polygon's curvature now can be adjusted:

Which looks quite cool unless you know you can do the same in Inkscape interactively :)

Sticky Tools

In earlier versions of Scribus current tool was automatically switched to Selector right after you released mouse button having had drawn something. Now you can suppress this and keep the drawing tool active by enabling Sticky tools option in the Insert menu. Well, I'm not really sure why this behaviour is optional and not a default. Works just fine in Inkscape.

New documents view modes and options

I'll just list these new features, available from View menu:

• Preview Mode. Switches off displaying grid, guides, baseline grid and other indicators. It's also available in the bottom toolbar (a button with an eye icon).
• Show Control Characters. If you ever used OpenOffice.org Writer and/or Microsoft Word, you know this feature: it toggles displaying of space, non-breakable space, smart hyphen and other indicators.
• Rulers relative to Page. If you changed page's origin, reenabling this menu item will move the origin to its default position (top left corner of a page).
• Move/Resize Value Indicator. When you move or resize an object, the will be a small tooltip right next to mouse cursor to tell you new coords of upper left corner of an object or new width/height of an object.