Things are happening in Scribus!
First, there were multiple advances in the support of RTL languages!
The big news is that Scribus now supports RTL page binding:
rtl-binding.png
On top of it:
- Tabs and margins now work correctly for RTL paragraphs.
- Drop caps also work for RTL text.
- The same for lists.
I would dare to affirm, that now Scribus starts to be usable for RTL documents.
Much progress (and effort!) has also happened for the tables: they are much better now!
Personally, I'm not sure that they are ready for prime time, but they are now at least usable.
I think that Scribus could profit from some real world use cases to check how well the features that have been implemented up to now cover the users needs.
It would be wonderful if Scribus users could post examples of tables they need or want to achieve with Scribus!
In brief:
- The tables handling has been modified to be more similar to LibreOffice.
- Many (many!) features have been improved or added, and small bugs have been fixed
- It's also possible to copy paste tables from LibreOffice Writer and Microsoft Word (you need to paste the table inside of an existing Scribus table).
A "work in progress" is worth being mentioned (because you might see it, when you start your new version of Scribus)
A new "First start" dialog has been created.
first-start.png
It's not (100%) working yet, but it will allow the user to go through the most common setup steps, when first starting Scribus.
Some smaller changes:
- In the render frames, the docDir allows to set the target folder for the document.
- It's now possible to select all the frames in a linked text frames chain.
- A new Scripter command has been added for checking the result of the Preflight Verifier.
- In the Scripter, two new commands allow long running Python commands while keeping the UI responsive: invokeLater() and processEvents().
- The rendering of Drop Shadows is much faster now (more improvements might come later)
Enjoy your summer!
This post contains commits up to July 22.
It already happened since the last post:
Open tickets with pending patches:
- apply masterpage: change the range fields to one field where user defined pages can be entered (like 1-4,7,9) (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=2341)
- Preflight verifier: check for trailing spaces (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17558)
- Scripter: GetItem(name) should look inside of groups (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17490)
- Export to PDF/X-1a:2003 (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17422)
- Freehand tool: always smooth the line (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=12438)x
- Picture frame padding (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1096)
- Export selection to SVG (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17438)
- Change from Conical gradient to mesh Gradient generate new color names (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17332)
- Limit the width of the tooltips (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17438)
- 'snap to guides' should be enabled by default (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=14956)
- disabling hyphenation for word by inserting softhyphen before it (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=10517)
- it should not be possible to insert multiple soft hyphens one after the other (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15600)
- WIP PATCH: Import pages with linked text frames breaks the links (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=8056)
- Warn when a hyphenation dictionary is missing (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15584)
- Image compression in PDF (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=2277)
- Support automatic line spacing in gettext plugins (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11063)
- Scribuses working in parallel overwrite each others temp files (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17319)
- ctrl: move image orthogonally inside of the image frame (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17144)
- fill a frame with the image (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15560)
- Modify the behavior of scripter's getSelectedTextRange() (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17618)
- Bleed should override page margins when using the Shift shortcut for creating frames (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=14606)
- Adjust frame height to text fails if frame is not tall enough to display text. (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=14668)
- Persist "Save as"'s format and add "Save a copy" to a different format (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17625)
- Add button group ui widget (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17571)
Tickets with "simple" tasks:
- cannot search and replace by / with character styles (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=16691)
- duplicate on layer (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=3556)
- A way to manage stylesheets when inserting a page from another document (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1710)
- Implicit right tab on right hand margin (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=2709)
- svg plug-in doesn't import text as (editable) text (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=9841)
- Expand item to the next guide (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17525)
- Add an option to export a PDF file containing all data relevant for production (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=3951)
- shift-drag to create items fitting multiple areas (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17526)
- PDF export directory presets (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=12219)
- button to convert column and rows guides to "real" guides (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=10114)
- selecting multiple items at once should happen in ltr/rtl order (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17385)
- Add an option to list used fonts first (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=8435) (also see the related tickets)
- Use Same folder for other missing images" isnt used for other frames using same image (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17563)
- Scripter: moveObject() only moves one of several selected objects (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=5875)
- more units to edit an image's size (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=6229)
- font family/style separation in quick character palette (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=6686)
- when creating an image frame a click should create it at the image size (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=10906)
- Modernize "Multiple duplicate" (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17620)
- Persist the basepoint (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17693)
- Remember the less / more state in the Search / Replace dialog (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17800)
Scripts to be created
- Split frame by paragraphs (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=8635)
- Split the frame in columns (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=8276)