News 2010-06-04

Scribus 1.3.7 Released

The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.3.7. This new release brings us closer to the next stable release 1.4.

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

Almost 50 bugs have been resolved since the release of 1.3.6. In addition, Scribus 1.3.7 provides some minor enhancements:

• New import filters for Calamus CVG and Apple PICT files
• New Scripter functions
• Usability improvements
• Translation updates
• Updates to the documentation
• PDF bookmark export fixes
• Text layout fixes

The Scribus Team considers this version to be quite stable and ready for many real-world use cases. However, since there are still some annoyances that prevent us from 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:

• 1.3.8svn code (the next iteration of the development version and prossibly 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 1.3.7 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 1.3.7, you should only work with a copy of your file, since once it is saved in 1.3.7 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.

Installers for Windows, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/eComStation , as well as the source code are available here:

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

Further Download Options

• Upstream Debian/Ubuntu repo: http://debian.scribus.net
• Fedora 11, 12, 13 RPMS: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs
• OpenSUSE 11+ and SLED* RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs
  
  • Note installing 1.3.7 on SLE11 requires upgrading Qt to 4.5.2, which will
  automatically be provided via YaST
• Mandriva 2010 RPM: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs

Source Verification

scribus-1.3.7.tar.bz2:
9a5c68c0d72d4ced86900a80725f34aeb1e4a481

sha1sum scribus-1.3.7.tar.bz2:
9a5c68c0d72d4ced86900a80725f34aeb1e4a481

Credits

The Scribus Team would like to thank Anduin.net/Øverby Consulting (Norway) for their continued hosting of all of the Scribus websites.

We are also grateful to Linux New Media (Germany) for sponsoring.

Moreover, the Scribus Team is pleased to name Resene Colours (New Zealand), dtp studio (Germany), Serenity Systems (USA), Vectorportal (Russia) and Marabu-Druckfarben (Germany) as Special Supporters.

Finally, the Scribus Team would like to thank the many end users, translators, testers and contributors who helped us with this important release.

About Scribus

Scribus is an award-winning, cross-platform Open-Source page layout application with a focus on high-quality and commercial-grade PDF and PostScript output. Originally developed on Linux, Scribus runs natively on Mac OS X, OS/2, many forms of UNIX and Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 by now.

Underneath a user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colour, spot colours, separations, ICC colour management, printing marks and versatile PDF creation, including PDF/X.

Encouraged by professionals and beginners alike, the Scribus Team, supported by a large and constantly growing number of enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, is dedicated to improve "one of the most powerful and useful open-source projects out there" (TechRepublic).