Scribus 1.4 released [LWN.net]

Version 1.4 of the Scribus desktop publish system - the first major stable release in four years - has been announced. 1.4 is based on Qt4 and offers much more extensive undo/redo operations, lots of new import filters, better color management, and a lot more. "Now that Scribus 1.4.0 has been released, the Scribus Team will focus on stabilizing the 1.5 development branch, which will comprise amazing new features like support for PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-4 and PDF/E, Mesh Gradients, native PDF import, XAR import, a completely rewritten table implementation, a rewritten text system, and much more."

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Scribus 1.4 released

Posted Jan 3, 2012 15:24 UTC (Tue) by ihok (guest, #82088) [Link] (4 responses)

I used Scribus 1.4rc6 to put together a good-looking resume. It was my first time using DTP in any way at all. Came out pretty well. The UI was thought out nicely in most ways, although some things were unnecessarily difficult, like I couldn't figure out how to set a horizontal rule to precede every level-2 heading. So I'm very excited about the new release.

At the same time, the 1.4 release announcement reads like somebody didn't get the "release early, release often" memo. "The 1.4.x version is now in stable/maintenance mode, which means few features will be backported from the 1.5 development branch. In general, only bugs will be fixed in subsequent 1.4.x versions, along with new content, like new translations, new templates, or additional color palettes." Really? Your users just waited four years for a new release, and now they'll have to wait $deity-knows-how-long again? If your new release has a solid new architecture, why not just add features to that? 1.5 sounds fantastic, but I'd rather take 5% of those exciting new features if I could get them in a new release in 3 months.

Scribus 1.4 released

Posted Jan 3, 2012 16:29 UTC (Tue) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link] (3 responses)

My impression is that a lot of folks in the DTP world are pretty conservative when it comes to their software. For them, stability in the release doesn't just mean that the program doesn't crash, it means there aren't subtle bugs in the output that aren't always obvious at a glance, but can be disastrous if they went to press with it.

And if you want more up to date features and don't mind risking bugs in your output, scribus is pretty easy to build from source and is usually very stable in the "doesn't crash" sense of the word.

Scribus 1.4 released

Posted Jan 3, 2012 18:36 UTC (Tue) by malex (guest, #15692) [Link]

Hopefully, 1.4 release cycle will fade into memory as an aberration and 1.6 will come soon enough to alleviate the apprehension you are expressing. The Qt3-Qt4 transition started off fast, but the resulting codebase took a long time to refactor and stabilize. In the interim many new features were introduced, which produced their own regressions and so on. Last but not least, the active 'core coder' part of the team has not increased even though the size of the codebase has. So the lack of manpower was a large factor as well.

Soon enough builds from the 1.5.0svn tree will pop up in our upstream repositories and in the SF.net project download area as 'scribus-ng' or such, so users who don't absolutely need deadline driven collaborative team production level stability will be able to use the new features. It has been one of the goals of the Scribus Team to keep the developmental tree stable for such users since the beginning of the project.

Scribus 1.4 released

Posted Jan 6, 2012 20:07 UTC (Fri) by ttonino (guest, #4073) [Link] (1 responses)

A think that DTP users hate is if loading a document in a slightly differen version will render it differently.

That works as followd: you produce a document in version X.YZ. You send it to a printer who uses X.YZA (or X.YY) to print it. Subtle differences pop up, which are not caught when proofing the final stages (which generally is more about checking all images and pages are there and everything is in color, and not about whether all line endings are still correct).

I HATED Quark Xpress for that reason. If the printer had a different dictionary, it would render using that and mess up everything. Had to send the document, fonts, dictionary and whatnot. But changing features in the software is much more dangerous!

Scribus 1.4 released

Posted Jan 9, 2012 14:33 UTC (Mon) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

surely if you send a PDF to the printer you dont have this problem.

(though you still need all your editors and designers working with fully completable versions)