Scribus 1.4.4 Released, Making Significant Inroads Into Newspaper Publishing

The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.4.4, as well as new partnerships with respect to newspaper publishing.

Scribus 1.4.4 is mostly a bugfixing release, but it also adds a number of new features, some of which are relevant for newspaper production.

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 alpha release (version number 1.5.0) in the course of 2014.

Most Important Changes

PDF/X-1a export.

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

The Autoquote script has been rewritten and enhanced. It now provides more options and adds thin spaces to French texts where appropriate.

A script to align images in frames has been added.

Full support of the OpenICC Directory Proposal (http://www.oyranos.org/wiki/index.php?title=OpenIccDirectoryProposal).

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

Page borders can now act as guides (and thus be used for snapping of items).

The CMYK color palette created by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) for newspaper advertisements has been integrated into Scribus.

A new color palette for professional geographers has been added.

Export to various bitmap formats has been re-enabled on Mac OS X.

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

Adjustments for Windows 8.x.

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

Documentation and translation updates and improvements.

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

New Industry Partnerships with SCS and the NAA

The Scribus Team is honored and proud to proclaim a new partnership with a leading provider of newspaper systems, namely Software Consulting Services, LLC (http://www.newspapersystems.com), the co-inventor 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 credible history of open source contributions since 1991, and a proven 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.

Thanks to the efforts of SCS, Scribus 1.4.4 is being shipped with the latest version of the CMYK color set created and recommended by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) for newspaper printing. This is another "first" for Scribus, comparable to being the first program to support PDF/X-3, as Scribus is, at this juncture, the only DTP software that provides the latest version of the official NAA color set.

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	7bd3b4a7d6e6262126079847c617b3a25ba8ab06
Source	scribus-1.4.4.7z	31207a3ce6bd46ad515544fd94c4d43d029b2ae6
OS X Leopard or higher, Intel x86 (DMG)	scribus-1.4.4.dmg	2865d3a49b59fa76c2ab7a2c57a11ec8a9d352fe
OS X Leopard or higher, Intel x86 (PKG)	scribus-1.4.4.pkg	c460d40ccc02f639b8abe6a89f9a77c506dd5089
Windows 32/64 Bit	scribus-1.4.4-windows.exe	44dd8c83ce1864fab7ed490622a2862d4cea5025
Windows 64 Bit	scribus-1.4.4-windows-x64.exe	5baf0bfeccccdba25fc904531a1aacd460f77c71
Windows PortableApps.com Format	ScribusPortable_1.4.4.paf.exe	coming soon
OS/2 and eComStation	scribus-1.4.4-os2ecs.zip	coming soon

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), Scientific Illustration Services Corp. (USA), the Newspaper Association of America (USA) and Software Consulting Services (USA) as Special Supporters and donors of color palettes and other content 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.