Scribus 1.7.4 is the latest development release in the 1.7.x series. It includes a comprehensive overhaul of tables: predictable border editing, spreadsheet-style selection and keyboard navigation, table and cell styles with conditional formatting, undo/redo across table operations, and the ability to paste tables from other applications. This release closes a large number of long-standing table issues, several open since the 1.5 development series. Alongside the table work, 1.7.4 brings major right-to-left and bidirectional text improvements, a new First Start Wizard, a redesigned page-size and template system, improved printer options through CUPS, Style Manager refinements, more reliable undo and redo, and the usual set of crash fixes, performance improvements, and internal code cleanup.
This release also fixes seven security vulnerabilities in Scribus's image loaders and import filters, the same fixes shipped in the stable 1.6.7 release. All users of 1.7.x are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
Highlights
Comprehensive Table Overhaul - Tables have been substantially reworked, with more predictable border editing, spreadsheet-style cell, row and column selection and keyboard navigation, table and cell styles with conditional formatting, undo/redo, and support for pasting tables from LibreOffice, Microsoft Office and Apple Pages. Many table bugs dating back to the 1.5.x era have been resolved.
Security Fixes — Seven memory-safety vulnerabilities in the PSD, PICT, TIFF, DRW and SVM loaders have been fixed.
Right-to-Left & Bidirectional Text - A document-level LTR/RTL switch has been added to Preferences, the New Document dialog and Document Setup. Page layout and binding now follow the document's direction, and numerous RTL rendering issues have been fixed, including problems with the text ruler, drop caps, bulleted lists, Arabic underlining and the interface.
First Start Wizard - A new wizard runs the first time Scribus is launched and guides users through initial setup, including page-related defaults and default folders.
Page Sizes & Templates - Page sizes are now defined in external, localizable template files with automatic format detection. Users can create and delete their own page templates directly in the New Document dialog, separately from the read-only system templates.
Printer Options - Scribus now honors more printer options when printing. IPP option handling has also been improved, with settings presented using human-readable values.
Style Manager Improvements - Default styles can optionally stay at the top of the list, style ordering is now consistent, multiple styles of different types can be deleted at once, and table and cell styles can be imported.
Security
Seven memory-safety vulnerabilities have been fixed in the loaders that read PSD, PICT, TIFF, DRW and SVM files. A specially crafted file in any of these formats could cause Scribus to read or write outside allocated memory when placed in an image frame or imported, leading to a crash or potentially worse. Each loader now validates the dimensions and offsets it reads from the file before using them.
CVE-2026-104061 – PSD: out-of-bounds read from a static array, leading to a heap write
CVE-2026-104062 – PICT: heap overflow in the pixmap loader when the stored bytes-per-line does not match the image width
CVE-2026-104063 – PICT: out-of-bounds read of planar image data
CVE-2026-104064 – TIFF: integer overflow in the tile buffer size calculation, leading to an out-of-bounds write
CVE-2026-104065 – DRW: out-of-bounds scanline access through an unvalidated vertical offset
CVE-2026-104066 – PICT: heap overflow when unpacking 4-bit indexed images
CVE-2026-104067 – SVM: out-of-bounds access when image and mask dimensions differ
Tables
Tables have received the most extensive work in this release, addressing issues that in some cases had been open since the 1.5 development series. Table editing now behaves much more like the table tools users may be familiar with from word processors and spreadsheets.
Table & Cell Styles
Table styles now support conditional formatting for the header row, total row, banded rows and columns, the first and last column, and the four corner cells. A body-cell area acts as the default for cells that do not match a more specific area.
Cell styles now have a paragraph style directly, rather than only through the table style's conditional-area editor.
Cell vertical alignment (top, middle or bottom) can now be set in cell styles and applies when a cell, row, column or the whole table is selected.
Table and cell styles, including the colors used for their fills and borders, can now be imported through the Style Manager.
Copying a table between documents now carries its table style and the cell styles used by its areas, so the pasted table keeps its appearance instead of falling back to defaults.
Conditional-area formatting now uses the normal cell-style inheritance mechanism. Each area can have a selectable "based on" cell style, with local overrides and a reset option.
Borders
Border editing is now more predictable: clicking a side in the Properties Palette side selector immediately adds or removes that border, and the widget stays in sync with the cell's actual state. The inner cross toggles the inner horizontal and vertical cell lines.
Border edits now apply to every cell in a table rather than only the table-level fallback, fixing cases where changing borders affected only some lines.
Border collapsing between adjacent cells now respects border visibility and prefers explicitly set borders. Clearing a side now correctly removes the border even when one is inherited.
Cell borders are shown in the Properties Palette when the whole table is selected, and table and cell padding can be set from the palette.
Background color percentage (shade) is now supported for tables through table styles.
Selection & Navigation
Cell navigation now works more like a word processor or spreadsheet: arrow keys move through text character by character and cross into the next cell at the text boundary, with Shift extending the selection.
A new Table > Select submenu provides cell, row, column and whole-table selection. A spreadsheet-style select-all corner has also been added to table edit mode, and dragging from a row or column header extends the selection.
Cells can be selected with Alt+Shift+arrow, and a mouse selection can be continued from the keyboard.
A table can be sized to the guide area by Shift-clicking when placing it, as with other page item types.
Cell navigation follows the table's RTL direction, so arrow and Tab movement follow the on-screen order in right-to-left tables.
Rows & Columns
Rows now grow to fit their contents as text is typed, and a row can no longer be made smaller than the height its contents require.
Column width can now be changed when only a single column exists. Setting the width or height of all columns or rows grows the frame to fit.
Pressing Tab in the last cell now expands the table by appending a row at the existing row height, rather than rescaling the existing rows.
"Set Row Heights" and "Set Column Widths" in the context menu now show the current value.
Cells can be merged and split.
Editing & Undo
Undo and redo now cover table editing, including inserting and removing rows and columns, distributing rows and columns, and merging and unmerging cells. Layout adjustments that follow an edit no longer add unnecessary entries to the undo history.
Cut, copy and paste now work within a cell after selecting text with the mouse or by double-clicking.
The text cursor is now constrained to the cell height, so it no longer overflows a short row.
While editing a cell, the cell's tabs and indents are shown in the horizontal ruler.
The canvas now refreshes during cell editing as it does for ordinary text frames.
Pasting from Other Applications
Tables copied from LibreOffice Writer and Calc, Microsoft Word and Excel, and Apple Pages can now be pasted into Scribus tables.
A table on the clipboard can now be pasted directly onto the canvas, creating a table at the paste point. "Paste Here" from the context menu places it at the cursor, while a keyboard paste centers it in the view.
Pasting portions of a spreadsheet into a table now works as expected.
A stray leading space that could appear in text pasted from LibreOffice has been fixed, as has a missing space when pasting Gurmukhi text from ODT files.
Fixes
Text in table cells now aligns to the page baseline grid.
Drawing out a new table on the canvas to set its initial size has been fixed.
Resizing a table from the Properties Palette now works correctly.
Creating a table with the zoom above 100% no longer shifts the page to the right.
The "Remove Direct Formatting" button now fully clears direct table and cell formatting and refreshes the palette.
Resetting a table style now also resets the character and paragraph styles.
Cell-style borders are no longer lost when a document is saved and reloaded, fixing a bug that could leave loaded tables appearing borderless. Inherited padding and borders are no longer baked into saved cells, and cell-style fills now render correctly on the canvas.
The Preflight Verifier is no longer greyed out while a table is in edit mode.
Right-to-Left & Bidirectional Text
A document-level LTR/RTL switch has been added to Preferences, the New Document dialog and Document Setup, and is stored in preferences and document files.
Page layout is now aware of right-to-left documents: binding direction can be switched from the Pages palette, PDF binding is taken from the document settings, and page-binding icons have been added.
Right-to-left text in the ruler now positions tabs and margins correctly.
The extra left indent on the second line when RTL drop caps are enabled has been fixed, as has the bulleted-list character offset in RTL text.
Underlining of Arabic text no longer appears as small broken lines.
RTL interface glitches have been addressed, including the zoom-percentage direction and Arabic menus being cut off at the start.
Tables now carry a direction setting.
First Start Wizard
A First Start Wizard has been added. It runs the first time Scribus is launched and guides users through the initial setup.
Page Sizes & Templates
The page-size system used by the New Document dialog has been redesigned:
Page sizes are now loaded from external template files rather than being hardcoded, with automatic detection of the page-size format.
Users can create and delete their own templates directly in the New Document dialog. System templates are kept separate and cannot be modified through the interface.
Templates carry width, height, orientation, layout, binding direction, margins and bleeds, and support legacy names from older Scribus files.
Page names are localized in the template files, so common names such as A4 do not need to be translated. Page sizes are now identified by their dimensions rather than by hardcoded identifiers.
Styles
"Default" styles can optionally stay at the top of the Style Manager regardless of alphabetical sorting, and inconsistent style ordering has been fixed. The Style Manager context menu remembers the option to show default styles at the top.
Multiple styles can now be deleted at once, including selections spanning different style types.
Line styles are now shown in the Style Manager.
Table and cell styles can be imported (see Tables above).
The Line Style widget has been updated.
Undo & Redo
Grouping, moving and ungrouping items in sequence now undoes correctly.
Operations on a text chain that involve several frames are now recorded as a single undo step.
Importing master pages now groups its undo actions correctly, and clicking a frame brought in with Import Page no longer records an extra move that would shift the frame on undo.
Deleting guides in the Guide Manager no longer records empty undo entries for pages that have no guides.
Deleting an image with a long path or file name no longer widens the Edit > Redo menu item.
A number of operations no longer generate spurious undo steps.
Text & Typography
A new menu action selects every frame in the linked text chain of the selected frame, making it easier to change the layout of linked frames.
Search & Replace has gained Next and Previous buttons, and the selection is now cleared when text is selected in a different text chain.
The character scaling controls in the Story Editor now use the correct width and height icons.
Printing
Scribus now honors more printer options.
IPP option handling has been improved, with raw IPP values converted to human-readable values for better presentation in the user interface.
Canvas & Display
A new vertical ruler mode measures from the top of every page, so the ruler no longer keeps growing across the length of the document.
Preview mode now hides guides, margins and the bleed area while a master page is being edited, and clips the page to the trim format.
Text selection with the mouse is more precise.
Scrolling performance on simple documents has been improved.
A number of operations no longer generate unnecessary undo steps.
The Shape palette now draws shapes in the correct colors in dark mode.
Drop-shadow rendering is faster.
Live Spell Checker
Following its introduction in 1.7.3, the live spell checker has been refined for stability and performance:
A memory leak that could cause memory usage to grow has been fixed with certain dictionary combinations.
Dictionary encoding is now detected and used, fixing issues with non-UTF-8 dictionaries.
Spell-check results are now cached, reducing unnecessary repaints and relayouts. Stale results from closed documents are also discarded.
Underline rendering has been improved. Underlines are drawn at the baseline with the pen width and are scaled to the font's size and shape.
A file-open failure caused by the spell checker has been fixed.
Graphics & Import/Export
Several memory leaks in the GraphicsMagick image loader have been fixed.
Importing Photoshop custom shapes no longer freezes. The importer now stops at the end of the shape list instead of reading further resource blocks as additional shapes. Dragging shapes from the Shape palette onto the canvas now works.
Preflight
Exporting to PDF/X with an invalid character style no longer crashes. The verifier now reports a missing style when a paragraph or character style's parent no longer exists, and text frames whose default style parent cannot be resolved are also caught.
The setting to ignore progressive-image-type warnings is now respected, and the minimum and maximum image-resolution settings can be saved.
Scripting
A new Scripter command returns the current preflight errors and warnings.
A new function allows scripts to run callables on the GUI thread.
User Interface
Several dark-theme issues have been fixed: dock panel title bars and tab strips no longer show white patches, switching theme now restyles the dock panel tabs, hover and press feedback on tab-close and floating-panel-close buttons is visible, the page selector and zoom buttons no longer flash a light gradient when pressed, and the Arrange Pages binding icon no longer disappears after a theme change.
The default scratch space colour now follows the active theme.
The palette font preference now scales dock contents consistently.
Creating a linked text frame now starts at the mouse pointer rather than offset from it, and the link tool icon stays the same between its starting position and use.
The Swap buttons in the Distribute palette no longer act in reverse.
The Ctrl++ zoom-in shortcut now works as expected.
Esc can no longer be assigned as a custom keyboard shortcut.
The Guide Manager has been given a UI polish.
New documents no longer end up with only the minimal set of three colours when the configured default colour set cannot be resolved; Scribus now falls back to the loaded default colours.
The splash-screen colour mode can be chosen explicitly.
A document-directory variable is available for render-frame processing.
Changing a facing-pages, right-page-first layout to single page no longer corrupts the first page's layout.
The default Lorem Ipsum paragraph count is now one.
Build System & Compatibility
Fixed build failures with newer versions of Poppler.
Updated the Qt Advanced Docking System to 5.1.1, including a crash fix, and added a preference to force palette title bars so docking works correctly with tiling window managers.
Added HarfBuzz vector-finding support.
Bug Fixes
Fixed a crash when adding an index mark in an empty text frame; index entries can no longer be added with empty text.
Fixed a crash when deleting a text frame containing marks, and when deleting a non-existent mark.
Fixed a crash when opening Document Settings and pressing OK.
Fixed a file-open failure with 1.7.4 development files.
Fixed a crash caused by the font "Helsinki".
Fixed a crash when searching a document with no text frames.
Documentation
The new file format specification has been added to the wiki documentation.
Scribus 1.7.x also includes all of the relevant fixes from the 1.6.x series as of the release date.
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who reported bugs, tested fixes and contributed patches for this release, and to Tristan Madani from Talence Security who reported the image loader vulnerabilities responsibly.
Additional Notes
The complete changelog is available here: https://bugs.scribus.net/changelog_page.php?version_id=139
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