Scribus 1.4.4 Released, Providing Minor Feature Updates and Several Bugfixes. New Industry Partnership Announced

The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.4.4, as well as a new partnership with a leading vendor of newspaper systems.

Scribus 1.4.4 is mostly a bugfixing release, but also adds a few feature updates. It will likely be the last release in the 1.4.x branch, and the Scribus Team will from now on solely focus on the development of the next major version 1.6. We expect to make available a first beta release (version number 1.5.0) in the course of 2014.

Most Important Changes

The Barcode plug-in has been updated to reflect the latest changes in the underlying Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript (BWIPP).

Several issues related to the user interface and canvas display have been resolved.

An issue with the spellchecker, resulting in a crash, has been resolved.

The handling of transparencies in Photoshop-generated TIFF files has been improved.

The Autoquote script has been rewritten.

For a complete list of changes see: http://bugs.scribus.net/view_all_bug_page.php?filter=99610

New Industry Partnership with SCS

The Scribus Team is honored and proud to proclaim a new partnership with a leading provider of newspaper systems, namely Software Consulting Services, LLC (www.newspapersystems.com), the co-onventor of QuarkXTensions. SCS is already offering a plug-in called ScrImLay, which is written in Python and licensed under the GPL. ScrImLay enables import of Layout-8000 geometry files into Scribus and offers the same functionalities as the respective plug-ins for InDesign and QuarkXPress. A comparison between the results in InDesign, QuarkXPress and Scribus can be found here: http://bit.ly/1cBVcdC.

Scribus is also being supported for ad building from within SCS's CAS/CDS (Community Advertising Services/Community Display Services) application.

SCS will not only promote Scribus and support customers willing to migrate, but also contribute to the development of Scribus itself.

With almost 40 years of experience in building trusted newspaper systems, a proven history of open source contributions since 1991, and a credible track record with respect to new technologies, SCS is looking forward to create the next generation of newspaper software in cooperation with the Scribus Team.

Primary Download Locations

Installation packages for Windows, Mac OS X and the source code are available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus/1.4.4
Debian/Ubuntu repository: Debian and Ubuntu
Fedora and CentOS RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs
OpenSUSE, SLED, and SLES RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs
A ZIP archive for OS/2 Warp 4 and eComStation is available under: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus/1.4.4
A portable version for Windows is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/files/Scribus%20Portable/
Packaging for *BSD, Solaris and OpenIndiana is beyond our influence. We recommend updating the respective repository data on a regular basis.
All download options are listed at: http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Download

Download Verification

Description	File Name	Sha1sum
Source	scribus-1.4.4.tar.xz
Source	scribus-1.4.4.7z
OS X Leopard or higher (DMG)	scribus-1.4.4.dmg
OS X Leopard or higher (PKG)	scribus-1.4.4.pkg
Windows 32/64 Bit	scribus-1.4.4-windows.exe
Windows 64 Bit	scribus-1.4.4-windows-x64.exe
Windows PortableApps.com Format	ScribusPortable_1.4.4.paf.exe
OS/2 and eComStation	scribus-1.4.4-os2ecs.zip	)

Credits

The Scribus Team would like to thank Anduin.net and Modirum for their continued hosting of all of the Scribus websites.

We are grateful to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (France) and Linux New Media (Germany) for sponsoring.

The Scribus Team is also honored to have Resene Colours (New Zealand), dtp studio Oldenburg (Germany), GiveLife Color System (Spain), and Scientific Illustration Services Corp. (USA) as Special Supporters and donors of color palettes since the 1.4.x release, just like we are grateful to the owner of Vector Portal for the permission to distribute some of his work as Scribus Templates.

Porting Scribus to OS/2 and eComStation is being supported by Mensys BV (The Netherlands) and Serenity Systems (USA).

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