News 2009-08-10 2

Scribus 1.3.5.1 Released

After almost 2 years of intensive work, the Scribus Team is proud to announce the release of Scribus 1.3.5. This release is a major development version on the road to milestone 1.4, which will be based on 1.3.5.

Following many testing cycles, the Scribus Team considers this version to be fairly stable and ready for many real-world use cases. For example, the cover of the Official Scribus Manual has been created with a release candidate of 1.3.5. However, since there are still some rough edges, more cautious users may want to prefer to stick with the officially stable series 1.3.3.x, which will see its final bugfix release soon.

The Scribus Team will continue to implement new features and improvements in a new experimental branch. Once tested and confirmed as working flawlessly, they will be backported and become part of the 1.4 milestone.

In comparison to the latest developer release, Scribus 1.3.5 provides the following major changes and enhancements:

• 1.3.5 is based on Qt 4 (the minimum required to run 1.3.5 is Qt 4.5.0)
• A native OS X version, available as DMG file (Universal Binary)
• Improved menu integration with OS X
• Large parts of the canvas and text code have been rewritten
• A new frame type called Render Frames, which allows for rendering markup languages like LaTeX or POV-Ray inside Scribus
• Added import filters for the following vector formats: Adobe Illustrator, Xfig, WMF
• Added import filters for colour palettes, including allowing palette import from EPS/AI files
• Major improvements to the handling of solid colours, as well as new colour palettes
• Drag and drop improvements
• PDF 1.5 presentation effect support
• Optional embedding of PDF and EPS files
• Transform effects for items
• Path tools for shapes
• Added more additional default shapes, line patterns and arrowheads
• A new line editor for custom line styles
• A new Quick Start Guide in the Help Browser, as well as other major updates and enhancements to the online help
• Significant enhancements to existing features like the Scrapbook, the Image Manager or the Font Preview

Furthermore, about 1100 feature requests and bugs, large and small, have been resolved. Detailed overviews of the changes are available here and here.

Important Information

Please note that we have branched our code repository:

• 1.3.5 code 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 has already undergone many changes.

Please update your notes/scripts to reflect this change.

The Scribus Team still recommends that all distributions package only Scribus 1.3.3.13 or 1.3.3.14svn. We recommend the additional packaging of 1.3.5 only if it is marked as a development version and can be installed alongside an existing Scribus 1.3.3.x (for example as scribus-ng).

An important reminder:

If you are working with 1.3.3.x and decide to implement some design features using 1.3.5, you should only work with a copy of your file, since once it is saved in 1.3.5 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.

Primary Download Location:

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

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus-devel/1.3.5.1

Further Download Options:

• Upstream Debian/Ubuntu repo: http://debian.scribus.net
• Fedora 10, 11 RPMS: [1]
• OpenSUSE 11.0+ and SLED RPMs: [2]
• Mandriva 2009 RPM*: [3]
  *) A package for 2009.1 is not yet available because of a dependency issue.

Source Verification:

sha1sum scribus-1.3.5.0.tar.bz2 d138e47e2177974d18c2f7c87a1db9e462bf6287

sha1sum scribus-1.3.5.0.7z 566258d5bd44115ba86783a65eddc7626f14aba5

Credits

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

As of July 2009, the Scribus Team is also pleased to welcome Resene Colours (New Zealand) and Marabu-Druckfarben (Germany) as Special Supporters and donors of colour palettes, most of which will become part of the 1.4 release.

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