[CREATE] Scribus 1.5.2 released

Tue May 17 20:51:25 UTC 2016

The Scribus Team is very pleased to announce the release of the development version Scribus 1.5.2, which is another major step onto the next fully-featured version 1.6.0. In terms of stability, 1.5.2 can be already be regarded as robust. The Scribus Team encourages the wide-spread use and testing of version 1.5.2 in as many environments as possible. User feedback will help us to release a rock-solid version 1.6.0.

Most Important Changes
======================

- The text layout engine has been rewritten from scratch in preparation for support of complex scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and Hindi coming in Scribus 1.5.3 and later. We are more than grateful for the magnificent work that the Oman House of Open Source Technology team, led by Khaled Hosny, completed.

- Within the context of the text layout system rewrite, some new text features introduced with the 1.5.0 release have been stabilized and improved.

- Improvements to the canvas rendering on Hi-DPI screens.

- The Autosave and File Recovery system has seen large improvements and is now highly configurable.

- The Resource Manager, as well as the official Scribus Resources pool have been expanded significantly, because Scribus 1.5.2 provides direct access to the more than 300 (mostly commercial) color palettes of the Open Colour Systems Collection in the LAB color space. We would like to thank dtp studio oldenburg and the initiative freieFarbe for making these color palettes available under a CC license. The Resource Manager user interface has received some enhancements.

- The Resource Manager now verifies resource downloads from Scribus servers with SHA256 checksums.

A complete changelog is available here: https://bugs.scribus.net/view_all_bug_page.php?filter=161020

A full data sheet (PDF) is available here: https://wiki.scribus.net/wiki/images/9/93/Scribus-specs-152.pdf

Caveats
=======

- Please note that the online help system hasn't been updated yet, and it probably be won't be until the final release of Scribus 1.6.0. However, with Scribus 1.5.2, Scribus now supports downloading of the online help manual and as this work is completed within Scribus 1.5.3, we will decouple the release of the help manual from the main application which will allow more regular updates to the help system.

- Some newly introduced features since 1.5.0, like footnotes, tables, ordered/un-ordered lists are "program-stable", i.e., they won't crash Scribus 1.5.1, but not "feature-stable", which means they may sometimes not work as expected for the time being.

- There will be more wide sweeping changes coming in 1.5.3 relating to text system updates for the complex language system support. People using Scribus 1.5.1 or 1.5.2 should ensure they keep document backups and the old versions installed prior to testing 1.5.3.svn and the 1.5.3 release when it arrives.

Dependencies
============

- Qt 5.3 or higher is now required

- cairo 1.14 or higher is now required

- Other dependencies will be reviewed in 1.5.3

Primary Download Locations
==========================

- Installation packages for Windows, Mac OS X, a Linux AppImage and the source code are available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus-devel/1.5.2/

- Fedora and CentOS RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs

- OpenSUSE, SLED, and SLES RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs

- Packaging for other Linux distributions, *BSD, Solaris and OpenIndiana is beyond our influence. We recommend updating the respective repository data on a regular basis.

Download Verification
=====================

Please visit the official announcement on https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/1.5.2_Release for Sha256 and Sha1 checksums.

Credits
=======

The Scribus Team would like to thank Anduin.net and Modirum for their continued hosting of all of the Scribus websites.

We are grateful to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and Linux New Media (Germany) for sponsoring.

The Scribus Team is also honored to have Resene Colours (New Zealand), dtp studio Oldenburg (Germany), Scientific Illustration Services Corp. (USA), the Newspaper Association of America (USA), Software Consulting Services (USA) and freieFarbe (Germany) as Special Supporters and donors of color palettes and other content since the 1.4.x release, just like we are grateful to the owner of Vector Portal for the permission to distribute some of his work as Scribus Templates.

Porting Scribus to OS/2 and eComStation is being supported by Mensys BV (The Netherlands) and Serenity Systems (USA).

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

An HTML version of this announcement with screenshots is availble here: https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/1.5.2_Release