Scribus Version 1.3.3.7 Readme

What's New ?

The Scribus 1.3.3.7 is the tenth development release of the next generation for Scribus, and the 7th in the stabilised 1.3.3.x series. While it is fairly stable, there are a number of under the hood changes which are on-going. This release features, amongst other things, the first beta of Scribus ported natively to the OS/2(R)/eComStation(TM) platform.

The file format has changed and is NOT backwardly compatible. You have been warned. We have specifically disabled the ability to open 1.3.x files in the stable 1.2.x versions. Our plans for a new file format should be settled in the 1.3.4 -1.3.5 development period.

1. Windows users are strongly encouraged to install the latest Ghostscript before installing Scribus. This greatly simplifies setting up EPS importing. Ghostscript is a mature PostScript interpreter and is essential for EPS import into Scribus.
2. Because of the new enhanced menu/keyboard shortcuts code, 1.2.x keyboard short cuts are not migrated and will be recreated once on the first launch 1.3.x. There are vastly more keyboard shortcuts and they can be exported to use on other machines if customized.
3. On initial launch, 1.3.x will offer to convert preferences to the new 1.3.x format. This is recommended. Scribus 1.3.x will store its preferences separately from 1.2.x.
4. You can install both versions in parallel and run them at the same time. The only caveat is to install them using different prefix/ directories e.g 1.2 in /usr/local and 1.3 in /opt or $home/bin. You can use the --prefix argument to configure to set where Scribus should be installed.

Scribus 1.3.3.x includes:

• Undo with objects specific undo capabilities. The number of undo/redo steps can be set in the preferences. There is also a new palette which has the undo history with details of each action.
• Much more extensive support for CMYK images, including clipping paths in TIFF and JPEG files, as well as extensive support for native Photoshop ® PSD files. 16 bit CMYK TIFF and PSD support will follow soon. Use of CMYK images is recommended with color management properly setup and active for best on screen appearance. CMYK-JPEG is also supported.
• Completely revised document and application preferences. They are independently set of each other. New documents will inherit the current application preferences. Moreover 1.3.x preferences can exist side by side with 1.2.x preferences without issue.
• This documentation is mostly based on 1.2.x, but there are some updates for 1.3, notably concerning the preferences and printing.
• Scribus now has true facing pages and images and other objects can span them.
• Scribus now has "scratch space" which can be used to store objects partially or fully off the page.
• Scribus now has its own built-in pre-flight file verifier for printing or exporting PDF. The default settings are to ensure images and fonts are of sufficient quality to provide trouble-free printing or PDF export. You can choose to ignore them in settings, but they are carefully chosen to ensure a minimum of quality or avoid known limitations of PS3 or PDF versions.

Scribus 1.3.3.7 includes support for building via CMake, a replacement for traditional autotools. Please see:http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=install4 for details.

For detailed changes please see the ChangeLog and the Roadmap on http://wiki.scribus.net/.

To use Scribus in your native language be sure that the environment variable LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES, LANG, Qt locale, OR the command line option of -l/--lang <lang> is set correctly. This also can be changed in the preferences and takes effect immediately.

The EPS/PS import features in 1.3.x uses advanced features of Ghostscript. We recommend ALL users update to the newest version of Ghostscript available for your distribution. There are detailed hints on docs.scribus.net for installing GS 8.x in parallel to the GS installed by your distribution.

The current importer will now import raster images within an EPS file provided you have at least GS 8.15, with the current limitations:

• imagemask doesn't work correctly
• clip path is ignored
• creates one file for each bitmap, which can be a lot

PSD/CMYK TIFF Support

1.3.3+ now has support for CMYK PSD and 8-bit CMYK TIFF support. RGB PSD and 16-bit TIFF support is being developed. PSD and TIFF support includes layers, ICC profiles and embedding clipping paths. CMYKA is not yet supported as there is a limitation in the Qimage class. RGBA is supported. Current Scribus 1.3.4cvs does handle a much larger variety of CMYKA files along with advanced PSD features.

Activating Color Management requires installation of CMYK and RGB ICC profiles. Grey scale icc profiles in images are not supported in this release. Scribus comes with 2 icc profiles only to ensure color management works immediately. These profiles are not sufficient to provide correctly working color management. Please see the included help files and http://docs.scribus.net for details.

If you have a 64-bit version of Qt, sometimes ./configure will not detect the 64-bit version headers. Try :

./configure --enable-libsuffix=64

Other notes/known issues at the time of release:

There is a bug in font outline handling for some fonts in the freetype libraries. It's being worked on upstream. Don't file a bug report. Instead change the font used if you need the outlines. This is not a Scribus bug. Some testing has shown that this bug is not present in freetype 2.1.10+, but we counsel caution trying to upgrade freetype2. Upgrading freetype2 on some distributions can be quite difficult.

Issue with gradients:

If you have gradient (e.g. with black color) with 50% shade in both beginning and end of gradient, you end up with darker center than edges. One expects the gradient to have equal shading from beginning to end, especially if there is no other color-stops in-between them. This we believe is a libart issue and not fixable by us. The gradient will export and print properly. The optional cairo build is a compile time option. The is enabled by:

./configure --enable-cairo

Our experimental Cairo build does not have these issues. We encourage those willing to test the Cairo backend builds and report issues to the mailing list and/IRC. We *know* the Cairo enabled build is slower, but are encouraged by the on-going development by the Cairo team.

Font Issues

There are extensive notes and detailed on documentation on fonts and trouble shooting of font issues in the help documentation and online at http://docs.scribus.net. Please read these carefully before filing bugs.

There are issues with the postscript naming conventions with the Computer Modern Type 1 fonts, depending on distribution. In some cases, not all fonts from the same family are visible in Scribus. We are working on a more complete solution for the next release.

For Debian Users:

If Scribus does not start while complaining about the absence of PostScript fonts please install either xfonts-scalable or gsfonts-x11. They are in the "Recommends" and will be installed by all sensible apt front-ends.

For Suse 9.x Users:

• The littlecms libs 1.10, which shipped with Suse 9.0 does not offer complete support for all the the latest CMS features in Scribus 1.2. There are updated Suse 9.x RPM's available on the Scribus.net site. We also recommend using the latest version of lcms.littlecms 1.1.4 is the current version.
• We recommend using the latest Qt-3.3.4 rpms from Suse.
• To enable direct CUPS support which we recommend, make sure both cups-devel and openssl-devel are installed. Suse enables ssl support in CUPS. See the BUILDING file.

Fedora/RH with Qt 3.3.2-6+ has the same fixes.

There is a separate file, PACKAGING for detailed hints and notes on building packages for Scribus.

More hints and other information are on the http://www.scribus.net and http://docs.scribus.net sites. Full compile, install and FAQs are available there.

There is a lively on-line community, both on IRC @ #scribus on irc.freenode.net and the mailing list. Mailing list info can be found at: http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/mailman/listinfo/scribus

For the Scribus Team,

Peter Linnell
in January 2007