[scribus] CTL code merge successfully finished. This is huge!

["Christoph Schäfer"]

Hi all,


Yesterday was one of the most important dates in the history of Scribus so far. After more than a year of hard work by Khaled Hosny, Fahad Al-Saidi and the rest of the Oman House of Open Source Technology team, as well as Andreas Vox, the new text layout engine has been merged successfully with trunk and thus became part of Scribus 1.5svn.

The code rewrite enabled us to close dozens of long-standing feature requests and brings exciting new feature to Scribus.

Here's what you'll get:

- Dramatically improved speed for typing and editing text on canvas.

- A font preview in font selectors as you are used to from other layout and word processing programmes. It's still a bit clumsy and slow, especially if you have many fonts installed, but it works.

- Support for about 500 languages and/or scripts. Typographical settings (OTF) are now language-based.

- Support for right-to-left scripts.

- Support for advanced OpenType features like automatic ligatures or old style numbers.

- These features are also available in the Style Manager.


In addition, the Text tab has been removed from the Properties Palette, so there is now a separate UI palette called "Text Properties". (Windows > Text Properties)

Those who build Scribus trunk from source are invited to test the new features and capabilities to the extreme, especially with complex scripts and fully-featured OpenType fonts, so we get everything right in the upcoming 1.5.3 release. Please don't forget to test PDF export as well.


Happy testing (and please do test!)

Christoph