[scribus-dev] Announcement: Scribus 1.3.9 released

["Christoph Schäfer"]

The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.3.9. This new release brings us very close to the next stable version 1.4.

During this development period the team focused again on stability and correctness -- more than 70 bugs have been resolved since the release of 1.3.8. 

Scribus 1.3.9 also adds some new features, for example: 

ENHANCEMENTS TO THE BUILD SYSTEM: 
* FreeBSD and NetBSD are now fully supported by the build system.
* Translation files are now generated at build time, reducing SVN download time. Thus, it is now also possible to limit the number of UI translations during build time to save time and disk space.

ENHANCEMENTS TO THE SCRAPBOOK:
* Items can now be copied, cut, pasted and deleted in the Scrapbook
* Users can now select the Scrapbook folder when they are copying an item to the Scrapbook.

RESOURCES AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT:
* We have started adding new resources to the Scribus package, especially templates and colour palettes (among others Australian, British, French, Japanese and US national/government standard colour sets and Resene(R) colour palettes).
* Template categories and names are now also available in German and Hungarian.
* Standardised palettes are now protected from being inadvertently modified by a user.

FILE IMPORT:
* Scribus is now protected against crashes caused by images with an embedded and faulty ICC profile.
* The restriction of not offering import of  Windows and OS/2 bitmap files (BMP) has been removed.
* Some import issues with EPS files that don't conform to the specification have been resolved.

TYPOGRAPHY: 
* A script ("Autoquote") has been added to the Script menu that converts straight quotes in a text frame to correct quotation marks for many languages.
* As of Scribus 1.3.9, hyphenation patterns for traditional German and Swiss German spelling are available.

DOCUMENTATION: 
* Important parts of the Online Help have been rewritten or updated, and many new pages have been added. This is part of a major effort to align the information available via the Online Help with both Scribus's current feature set and the capabilities of the supported operating system platforms.
* Translations of the Online Help have been temporarily disabled, since they need to be synchronised with the English version once the update is complete.

The changelog for version 1.3.9 is available here: http://bugs.scribus.net/changelog_page.php. Please note that the changelog lists only changes that pertain to bugs or feature requests in the bugtracker. 

The Scribus Team considers this version to be quite stable and ready for most real-world use cases. However, since there are still some issues that we wish to resolve before releasing version 1.4, more cautious users may want to prefer to stick with the officially stable version 1.3.3.14.

The Scribus Team will continue to implement new features and improvements in the 1.5.0 development branch. Features that can be backported may become part of the 1.4 milestone.
   
==Important Information==

Please note that we have branched our code repository:

* 1.4.0.beta1 code (the next iteration of the development version) 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 continues to undergo heavy changes. 
Please use this branch for testing only!

The Scribus Team recommends that all distributions package Scribus 1.3.3.14 as "Scribus" or "scribus". We recommend the additional packaging of 1.3.9 only if it is marked as a development version and can be installed alongside an existing Scribus 1.3.3.14 (for example as "scribus-ng").

An important reminder: If you are working with 1.3.3.x and decide to implement some design features available in 1.3.9, you should only work with a copy of your file, since once it is saved in 1.3.9 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.

Please also note that since 1.3.8 the minimum Qt version required to compile and use Scribus is 4.6. If your distribution doesn't offer updated Qt packages, you may have to compile Qt yourself.

==Primary Download Location==

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

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus-devel/1.3.9/

An OS/2 package will be added soon.


==Further Download Options==

Upstream Debian/Ubuntu repo: http://debian.scribus.net

RPMs for various Linux distributions are available here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs

==Source Verification==
scribus-1.3.9.7z:
sha1sum 3a13eaddb8124a5b6e201fb61b57d2525e679def

scribus-1.3.9.tar.bz2:
sha1sum 86bc4db2d8fbb91fe94f8535327991e9128c5862


==Credits==

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

We are also grateful to Linux New Media (Germany) for sponsoring.

Moreover, the Scribus Team is pleased to name Resene Colours (New Zealand), dtp studio (Germany), Serenity Systems (USA), Vectorportal (Russia), Marabu-Druckfarben (Germany), De Telefoongids (The Netherlands) and Singapore Reizen (The Netherlands) as Special Supporters.

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


==About Scribus==

Scribus is an award-winning, cross-platform Open-Source page layout application with a focus on high-quality and commercial-grade PDF and PostScript output. Originally developed on Linux, Scribus runs natively on Mac OS X, OS/2, many forms of UNIX and Windows 2000/XP/Vista by now.

Underneath a user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colour, spot colours, separations, ICC colour management, printing marks and versatile PDF creation, including PDF/X.

Encouraged by professionals and beginners alike, the Scribus Team, with the support of a large and constantly growing number of enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, is dedicated to improve "one of the most powerful and useful open-source projects out there." (TechRepublic).

==Links==

- Scribus Website: http://www.scribus.net
- Scribus Wiki: http://wiki.scribus.net
- Scribus Developer Blog: http://rants.scribus.net/
- Bugtracker: http://bugs.scribus.net

- Scribus General Mailing List: 
http://lists.scribus.net/mailman/listinfo/scribus
- Scribus Development Mailing List: 
http://lists.scribus.net/mailman/listinfo/scribus-dev
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