14 DAY TRIAL // The road towards the major Scribus 1.6.0 stable series of the open-source and cross-platform desktop publishing software continues today with the release of the third milestone, versioned Scribus 1.5.3.
Scribus 1.5.3 comes about a year after the previous release, namely Scribus 1.5.2, and it adds quite a number of new features and improvements. Because it's been in testing for so long, the Scribus team considers this build ready for some production work, but warns users to be careful that it's still considered a development release.
"In addition to being a milestone in terms of typographic features, the Scribus Team is convinced that 1.5.3 has become stable enough to be used in new workflows and documents in a similar way to the transition from 1.3.3.x to 1.4.0 after the release of version 1.3.6. However, care must be taken, because this is still a development release," reads the announcement.
What's new in Scribus 1.5.3
Among the biggest changes implemented in Scribus 1.5.3, we can mention the rewrite of the text layout engine to support complex scripts, such as for Thai, Arabic or Hindi languages, but also to provide access to advanced OpenType functionality like alternate glyphs and ligatures.
A total of 500 languages and/or scrips are now supported in Scribus, and the new release makes text rendering and typing on the canvas much faster than before, implements font preview in font selectors, and removes the "Text" tab from the Properties Palette, making it available as a separate UI palette.
Scribus 1.5.3 also improves copy/paste of objects to or from files that contain huge color palettes, adds an import filter to let users import Krita's KRA file formats, and makes use of the XDG standard for configuration files, thus moving the preferences directory to ~/.config/scribus/ instead of ~/.scribus/.
Other than that, it updates the "Wikipedia RAL Classic" color palette, adds support for Qt 5.5 or later, implements a new script called "Caption" to add a text frame to an image frame, supports displaying of color values as tooltips in color selectors, and adds the harfbuzz, harfbuzz-icu and libicu packages as new dependencies.
Scribus 1.5.3 is available for download right now from our website as a source tarball if you fancy compiling it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but you can also grab the macOS and Microsoft Windows binaries if you want to install it on your personal computers. Check out the changelog below for more details on what's new.
