Sun 24 Jun 2012
Using Python and Cheetah for generating code from RelaxNG
Posted by avox @ Fileformat , GSoC , Under CoverNo Comments
Sun 24 Jun 2012
Wed 2 May 2012
Anyone who has looked at a Scribus preferences file (scribus.rc) will be aware that the sheer amount of settings is daunting. There’s a C++ file named prefsstructs.h that defines on 470 lines of code 29 data structures too hold various settings. And these are just dumb structs, without any code to read/write to XML (or even getters/setters or default values or scripter support). So how can we clean up this mess?
(more…)
Sun 18 Mar 2012
The Summer of Code 2012 is on!
We are happy to announce that the Scribus Team has been accepted into the illustrious Google Summer of Code program once again. It’s an honor to be a part of the premier Open Source hackathon that has many talented students from around the World work on the Open Source software, get noticed, improve their skills, contribute code, become a part of the community, and get paid by Google for doing it. We’re also hoping that someone might want to stick around and become a part of the team.
Right now we have three mentors. We’re always looking for more mentors and backup mentors. If you ever hacked on Scribus code please go ahead and apply at the GSoC 2012 site.
Student application period will open up on March 26th. Prospective students should already be working through the requirement list and getting acquainted with the development team and the Scribus Community.
Godspeed and have tons of fun. The Summer of Code is awaiting.
Mon 2 Jan 2012
After almost 4 years of intensive work, the Scribus Team (http://www.scribus.net) has released the new stable version 1.4.0 of the Open Source desktop publishing program Scribus.
Given this is the first major stable release in some time, this document outlines improvements over the last number of versions, rather than since just the last one. The idea is to form a general comparison between this and the last stable release.
In summary, more than 2000 feature requests and bugs have been resolved since the development of this new version started.
Major changes and improvements in comparison to the last stable version 1.3.3.14 are:
Now that Scribus 1.4.0 has been released, the Scribus Team will focus on stabilizing the 1.5 development branch, which will comprise amazing new features like support for PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-4 and PDF/E, Mesh Gradients, native PDF import, XAR import, a completely rewritten table implementation, a rewritten text system, and much more. The 1.4.x version is now in stable/maintenance mode, which means few features will be backported from the 1.5 development branch. In general, only bugs will be fixed in subsequent 1.4.x versions, along with new content, like new translations, new templates, or additional color palettes.
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. Users should be warned that 1.3.3.x cannot open 1.4.0 files.
The Scribus Team recommends that all distributions package Scribus 1.4.0 as “Scribus” (and replace the outdated Scribus 1.3.3.14).
The 1.4.x branch will now be developed in the Version14x branch of our Subversion repository, leaving the Version135 one behind. This also fixes the version numbering issues of the past, with just two main versions, 1.4.x and 1.5.x
The Scribus Team will continue to implement new features and improvements in the development branch 1.5.x.
We recommend the additional packaging of 1.5 only if it is marked as a development version and can be installed alongside an existing Scribus 1.4.0 (for example as scribus-ng).
The English online help has been mostly updated to match the new features. Translations have temporarily disabled, since they need to be synchronised with the English version once the update is complete. Further updates will be included with subsequent 1.4 releases.
Description | File Name | Sha1sum |
Source | scribus-1.4.0.tar.bz2 | af38413420eaa783d20f2db189aef408be844048 |
Source | scribus-1.4.0.tar.xz | 0e3afb98a56084c2938a8402df2d89214c42b809 |
OS X Leopard or higher (DMG) | scribus-1.4.0.dmg | eae5adacdc207f4bda6136dc48c26b83dcbf6b9a |
OS X Leopard or higher (PKG) | scribus-1.4.0.pkg | 64df9a61b33183dbc85b9a3090a648c75f320640 |
Windows 32/64 Bit | scribus-1.4.0-windows.exe | 268b9e8658528677ceac6252dae348c49643d159 |
OS/2 / eComStation | scribus-1.4.0-os2ecs.zip | 4fe0b3cf562cda4e1b78bf89a2340bb868610014 |
The Scribus Team would like to thank Anduin.net and Modirum for their continued hosting of all of the Scribus websites.
We are also grateful to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and Linux New Media (Germany) for sponsoring.
As of July 2011, the Scribus Team is also pleased to welcome Resene Colours (New Zealand) and Marabu-Druckfarben (Germany) as Special Supporters and donors of colour palettes which are part of the 1.4.0 release.
Finally, the Scribus Team would like to thank the many end users, translators, testers and contributors who helped us with this important release.
Scribus is an Open Source program for professional page layout with press-ready output to PDF files. Underneath a modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as color separations, CMYK and Spot Color support, ICC color management, and versatile PDF creation.
Mon 25 Apr 2011
See the Scribus Times and Gazette article for more details.
Wed 8 Dec 2010
It is hard to believe Scribus is almost an adolescent. Just yesterday, Scribus turned ten years old, with the first bits of code written by Franz Schmid in December 2000. A few months later, it was linked on Freshmeat and then, well… it kind of had a life of its own. I googled DTP and Linux and stumbled across the link to Franz’ home pages. Of course it would not compile… (User error on my part.)
However, after posting a short e-mail, during the time of dial-up internet, I got an almost instant reply with a: the correct fix b: a question I cannot remember exactly, but well, it struck me as the right kind of question.So a good sign.
Not long after that, began a long series of e-mails about page layout, PDF and design over the course of probably 2+ years. It was clear way back then Franz had the singular idea to create a page layout application with a robust powerful PDF engine. Then and now, it was a brilliant design decision in my opinion.
There have been some memorable moments:
The release of 1.0 which got the front page of slashdot and took out the community ISP in his town for 3 days and oops, my most important clients’ web server traffic climbed 5000% in a few hours, as all the screens shots were directly linked.
One other strikes me is testing a pre 1.0 version of Scribus in my client’s service bureau and seeing the color managed preview nearly perfectly matching the PDF output in a RIP.
Booting the first native port of Scribus on Windows (thanks Jean) and OSX (thanks Andreas)…
Another one is seeing LGM #1 come about from some idle chat in IRC. We expected an attendance of 50 to arrive and got 200..
Finding this mysterious character Ltning show up on IRC with an offer of lots of shiny gear for hosting us and delivering the goods.. for years on end now… I’ve yet to meet him in person, but already I know could give him my wallet and not worry.. Apparently the banks in Norway feel the same way 🙂
In the intervening years, Franz, Craig, I and others, along with our families have shared holidays together; quite a special thing to see when it all began over the Internet – across continents no less. Even better, we are still involved daily, because we have a lot of mutual respect and the bonds of friendship, but its still fun!
So, here is a virtual tip of the hat to Franz, Craig, Petr, Christoph, Andreas, Jean, Pierre and the others. Keep on rockin’
Wed 29 Sep 2010
I just paid the occasional visit to our download page on Sourceforge, and something seems to have escaped my attention earlier: We have become millionaires! Well, at least download millionaires, as our stable 1.3.3.x has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times since we made Scribus available on SF c. two years ago.
Not bad for a niche program, isn’t it? And these are only the files available via Sourceforge (i.e., the 1.3.3.x installers for Windows and OS/2, as well as the source code). You also have to add Scribus installations via Linux/BSD/UNIX package management or the OS X versions that can be installed via Fink.
Now, if Scribus received one Euro (or at least one US $) per download, the Scribus developers could consider to retire early, given the current download rate 😉
Sun 22 Nov 2009
It was a beautiful beginning of Summer. The Google Summer of Code was on and it was glorious and fun, or at least everyone expected it to be after our previous two years in the program went so well. There was no reason to worry. We had all our ducks lined up in a row – four slots assigned by Google to our team, all our infrastructure set up just right, and friendly and competent mentors paired up with promising and enthusiastic students who were going to work on great projects. However, “The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew.”
On the bright side, Thach Tran has completed his project successfully, which put Scribus’s PDF export once more ahead of most closed-source DTP programs. I would like to thank him for sticking around, working through the harder parts of the project, and persevering to the end! His mentor Pierre Marchand commended Thach on doing a great job of keeping his branch in sync with the trunk. He also kept lines of communication open and made frequent appearances in our IRC channel. All of this made Pierre’s job easier as the new project code could be compiled at virtually any time and any problems could be communicated quickly. So, congratulations Thach Tran.
Having said that, the rest of our GSoC 2009 student team has not fared very well. The second student did make an effort to move his project forward. Unfortunately, it seems that the project was outside of the scope of his skills at the time, so we had to fail him at mid-term evaluation time. We wish him good luck in his future endeavors. This is possibly the most frustrating part of the GSOC 2009 experience for us as it shows that our process of vetting potential student coders was not robust enough. If we get to do this again in the future I believe that we won’t accept any students who have not produced any patches to the Scribus codebase. There is always a churn of low-hanging fruit in the code as new features introduce easy-to-fix bugs and our fantastic user community constantly comes up with feature requests and bug reports. So, it wouldn’t be a problem for a competent student to produce a patch or two. I think it would save us a tremendous amount of time and effort and reduce Google’s overhead. Even if we only get one candidate with patches I’d rather relinquish the remaining slots to other organizations than risk accepting people who just won’t be able to make it even with hand holding by mentors.
The remaining two students bailed out before getting anything done at all. I suppose there could’ve been some objective reasons for their early departure, but they have not come up with any, so my conclusion is that they simply wasted our time. Unfortunately, they made it ever so difficult for other people with similar backgrounds to ever get enough credibility for acceptance into the program. Later on, one of the students made an appearance and promised to finish the project outside of GSoC. We’ll see if that promise turns into something tangible.
The story wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the Google folks. As before, they ran a fantastic program and provided all the help and resources to the GSoC organizations needed for success. I cannot thank Leslie Hawthorn, Ellen Ko, Cat Allman and the rest of the Google SOC crew enough for giving so much of their life to this program. Thank you guys!!! I’d also like to mention one of Melange gurus Pawel Solyga who was very prompt in responding to a bug report. All in all, the world is a better place thanks to the Google Open Source team.
Cheers,
Alex
Scribus Team GSoC 2009 Administrator
Sat 26 Sep 2009
Now that 1.3.5(1) is released, development has regained speed. Here’s a short overview of what has happened recently in 1.5svn and Scribus in general:
We are also glad that the release of 1.3.5(1) has found an overwhelmingly positive reception in the news outlets, from the Free Software press to magazines for professional publishers.
Finally, we are glad that more companies decided to support our project:
And let’s not forget to mention the operator of Vector Portal who agreed to help us with the creation of attractive templates for business cards and presentation templates. Lest we forget: We’re also working on other sets of templates for magazines, brochures etc.
Does this sound good? There’s more to come, stay tuned!
Wed 22 Jul 2009
We all know the saying “sometimes life gets in our way,” meaning that something didn’t work as expected. Scribus is no different, although in our case one major fact of “life getting in our way” was newly born (or soon-to-be-born Update: useradd -groups vanek,boys -c "23.07.09 7:00am; 3.2kg, 0.5m" filip
) babies, meaning an all-out positive distraction. There were other reasons, of course, that led to the delay of 1.3.5’s release, but after a long time of frustration with the progress of the code, we now have a lot of reasons to expect a bright future for our project again.
What has happened?
All that being said, and with a big Cheers to our supporters, I’m more confident than ever when it comes to the future of our project.