Scribus now includes the Short Words plug-in, which was previously installed as a separate plug-in. To prevent upgrade problems, you might want to uninstall if it was installed via a package or RPM. This was also shipped as the scribus-vlna package in both source and rpm format. See PACKAGING for more details.
Scribus also has a new OpenOffice.org Writer and Draw importer. This requires libxml2, preferably version 2.6.x+. The OpenOffice.org Writer importer will import styles from the OpenOffice.org doc and will create similar styles within your Scribus document. Version 1.2.1 supported OpenOffice.org 1.1.x and Star Office 6/7 file formats. Version 1.2.2+ supports OpenOffice.org 2.x/Star Office 8.x (OASIS) as well.
Scribus 1.2.4 also includes 2 icc color profiles to make sure color management is working immediately after install. Note that these are basic generic profiles not sufficient to ensure good color management. See the help files for details under color management. Grey scale icc profiles in images are not supported in this release.
Scribus 1.2.4 also supports the proposed OpenIcc standard icc profile locations: $home/color/icc and /usr/share/color/icc/ under linux. Scribus will automatically detect them in these locations. Some distro neutral rpms for installing profiles are available on www.scribus.net.
For detailed changes please see the ChangeLog.
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.
The EPS/PS import feature in 1.2.x uses advanced features of Ghostscript.We recommend ALL users update to the newest version of Ghostscript available for your distro. There are detailed hints on docs.scribus.net for installing GS 8.5+ in parallel to the GS installed by your distro.
If you have a 64-bit version of Qt, sometimes ./configure will not detect the 64-bit version headers. Try :
./configure --enable-libsuffix=64to test for 64-bit versions of libraries.
Other notes/known issues at the time of release:
Registration color 100%C 100%M 100%Y 100%K does no work properly with UCR enabled. A fix is expected in a future release. Registration with UCR disabled works properly.
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 2.1.9+, but we counsel caution trying to upgrade freetype2. Upgrading freetype2 on some distros can be quite difficult.
Issues 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 be with equal shade 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.
For Debian/Ubuntu 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.
We recommend all Debian/Ubuntu users to use the Scribus Debian Repository for updated Scribus package. These are newer and contain many bug fixes and updates, compared to the ones installed by default. See http://debian.scribus.net
For SuSE 9.x Users:
Fedora/RH with Qt 3.3.2-6+ has the same fixes.
There is a separate file, PACKAGING for detailed hints and denotes on building packages for Scribus.
Many other hints and info are on the www.scribus.net and docs.scribus.net sites. Full compile, install and FAQ's 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,
Franz Schmid
Peter Linnell
in September 2005