Version 1.4.0 of the popular open source desktop publishing program, Scribus, was released recently. This is great news for the community at large, but it also is a mark of pride for the Qt team.
The new version of Scribus has moved to Qt 4, “tuning for cross-platform compatibility” and taking advantage of some of the best new features in Qt 4.7.4 including Qt Quick, improved image caching technology and Qt Creator.
For the uninitiated, Scribus is a professional page layout tool with press-ready output to PDF files. Underneath its modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as colour separations, CMYK and Spot Color support. It is available for Apple Mac OS X Leopard (or higher), Linux as well as Windows 32 and 64-bit machines under the free and open source General Public License.
Writing on their own developer blog the team notes, “Thanks to the port to Qt 4, the Scribus Team now also provides install files for Mac OS X 10.5 or later (DMG or pkg format), as well as a native version for OS/2 Warp 4 and eComStation. Additionally, thanks to feedback from users of other UNIX platforms, Scribus will build and run on more of those platforms as well.”
Scribus use cases are many and varied and the software has been used to create everything from CD cover sleeves and booklets, Swiss mountain village tourist brochures right up to professionally presented magazines.
Projects like Scribus are one of the key motivators for those of us here who work on Qt. Seeing quality programs being developed using Qt give us a boost in our work. We love to hear about projects like this, so if you have a cool project, whether its open source or commercial (or somewhere in-between) let us know. We might even feature you here on the Qt blog!
