News 2010-07-27

Scribus 1.3.8 and Scribus Presentation Template Package Released

The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.3.8. This new release brings us closer to the next stable release 1.4.

During this development period the team focused again on stability and correctness.

More than 60 bugs have been resolved since the release of 1.3.7. In particular, import filters and PDF export have been improved. This version also adds a number of usability improvements, as well as documentation and translation updates. The bug tracker lists all changes made to 1.3.8.

The Scribus Team considers this version to be quite stable and ready for most real-world use cases. However, since there are still some issues that we wish to fix before releasing version 1.4, more cautious users may want to prefer to stick with the officially stable version 1.3.3.14.

The Scribus Team will continue to implement new features and improvements in our 1.5.0 development branch. Features that can be backported may become part of the 1.4 milestone.

Important Information

Please note that we have branched our code repository:

• 1.3.9svn code (the next iteration of the development version and possibly the last before the release of 1.4) is available from the "Version135" branch: svn://scribus.info/Scribus/branches/Version135/
• trunk (=experimental) is now versioned 1.5.0svn (svn://scribus.info/Scribus/trunk) and continues to undergo heavy changes. Please use this branch for testing only!

The Scribus Team recommends that all distributions package Scribus 1.3.3.14 as "Scribus" or "scribus". We recommend the additional packaging of 1.3.8 only if it is marked as a development version and can be installed alongside an existing Scribus 1.3.3.14 (for example as "scribus-ng").

An important reminder: If you are working with 1.3.3.x and decide to implement some design features available in 1.3.8, you should only work with a copy of your file, since once it is saved in 1.3.8 format, you will not be able to open it again with 1.3.3.x.

Similarly, if you are working with a team, try to make sure that all team members use the same Scribus version – this will avoid many headaches and extra work.

Please also note that as of 1.3.8 the minimum Qt version required to compile and use Scribus is 4.6. If your distribution doesn't offer updated Qt packages, you may have to compile Qt yourself.

Downloads

Primary Download Location

Windows and Mac OS X installers, as well as the source code are available here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus-devel/1.3.8/

OS/2 installers will be added soon.

Further Download Options

• Upstream Debian/Ubuntu repo: http://debian.scribus.net
• Fedora 13 RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs
• OpenSUSE 11.1+ and SLED 11 RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs

Source Verification

• MD5 Sum scribus-1.3.8-tar.bz2: 660b946ea3ba19e894fb5701832a6b54
• MD5 Sum scribus-1.3.8.7z: 6faf763a9ca8195245d33585f94474d7
• MD5 Sum scribus-1.3.8-win32-install.exe: 51762c70cccb4a479a5d0020a3732bf0
• MD5 Sum Scribus_1.3.8.dmg: 7df05a7dc0645be51438518857af4c86

New Presentation Template Package Available

The Scribus Team is also pleased to announce the availability of a set of templates for the creation of PDF presentations, which is released under a BSD license. They are based on the templates published by SUN Microsystems for OpenOffice.org. Installation instructions are included in the archive.

Download:

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/extras/templates/presentation_templates-0.1.zip/download
• MD5 Sum: e2bc54c7304d318645dfb8a60ca7b1e6

New Team Member

With great pleasure the Scribus Team welcomes a new member to our development team, Jain Basil, a computer science student from India. We are looking forward to some great contributions from this talented programmer!