Download Scribus 1.3.4

Scribus is an open source program focused on all things desktop publishing. It can be used for editing and formatting documents for printing, among other things, which can then be saved as PDF or Postscript. For an overview of the different options, we refer you to this page. The developers have released version 1.3.4 which can be downloaded as source code or already compiled for among others Mac OS X and Windows. The supplied announcement looks like this:

The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.3.4 Антон (Anton, newly born son of a Scribus developer)

Almost one year in the making, this new developement release brings Scribus to a new plateau in professional print capabilities, innovative features and a completely re-written text layout engine. Among the major new features in 1.3.4:

• A rewritten preview mode which allows designers and artists to view layouts on screen as readers with color viewing deficiencies would view a document. Thus, this enables a designer to avoid color combinations which affect legibility.
• Major additions to TIFF/PSD support. This includes the ability to use clipping paths in TIFF and PSD files to allow text wrapping. In addition, Scribus now can import special flavors of EPS exported from Photoshop known as Desktop Color Separations (version 1.0 and 2.0). Layers, blend modes, Duo,Tri and Quadtone PSD files are now also supported.
• The new styles and text capabilities include style inheritance for paragraphs, character styles and line styles. This is now managed by a new style manager palette.
• The new text layout engine has a multitude of enhancements for vastly better more appealing justification, including the use of optical margins and more sophisticated word spacing algorithms.
• New pre-press capabilities including, registration marks, crop marks, calibration bars and document meta info. These are all easily managed within the print and PDF export dialogs.
• Color management enhancements including better CMYK > CMYK conversions.
• A rewritten and more capable Scrapbook
• support for patterns; both bitmap and vector
• A more capable Align and Distribute Palette
• Extended Multiple Copying
• New transparency features including blend modes for layers and individual objects
• A new cross-platform Icon set from the Tango Project

Detailed release notes are available here.