Scribus Version 1.2.2 Readme

What's New ?

The Scribus 1.2.x versions feature a complete rewrite of the rendering engine. All rendering is done via libart and freetype2. This requires that libart_lgpl and freetype2 are installed.

Version 1.2.2 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 1.2.2 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 Open Office 1.1.x and Star Office 6/7 file formats. Version 1.2.2 supports Open Office 2.x/Star Office 8.x (OASIS) as well.

Additionally Scribus uses now a different way to find fonts, sadly this gives some changes in the font names Scribus uses. To convert old documents follow the procedure below:

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 is set correctly.

The new 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.x in parallel to the GS installed by your distro.

Activating Color Management *requires* installation of CMYK and RGB ICC profiles. Please see the included help files and http://docs.scribus.net for details. Grey scale icc profiles in images are not supported in this release.

If you have a 64-bit version of Qt, sometimes ./configure will not detect the 64-bit version headers. Try :

./configure --enable-libsuffix=64
to test for 64-bit versions of libraries.

Other notes/known issues at the time of release:

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.

Issue 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 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.

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 June 2005