The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the first release candidate for the upcoming Scribus 1.2. The Scribus team urges all users and distros to use this latest release and test thoroughly.

The Scribus 1.2 stable release planned for later this summer, encapsulates over a year of development building on the original 1.0 release. Already, Scribus is being used in commercial settings including a new weekly newspaper launched this spring.

Among the major features of Scribus 1.2:

* A new story editor, complete with style and formatting functions. Performance, stability and ease of use have been greatly enhanced. * Several new plug-ins, including exporting documents in many image formats,a font previewer and special hyphenation rules for Czech and other languages. * Many significant upgrades to the PDF exporter, including the ability to export gradients with transparency, Open Type Fonts, set linescreen, automatically adjust compression type and other advanced features. * A New Template and Save As Template function to make it easy for new users to create documents, as well as create new templates. * Over 250 bug fixes and feature requests have been implemented. * A new EPS/PS importer, which can import EPS/PS and then edit the imported vector objects as Scribus native objects. * Many improvements to the SVG importer/exporter. Scribus now can handle most types of gradients, including transparency in imported SVG. *Dozens of new keyboard accelerators and extensive tooltips throughout. *A new print previewer, which has the ability to render CMYK separations on screen, transparency, UCR (Under Color Removal) giving users a true postscript generated preview of the page. * Many enhancements to text frames including multi-columned text, baseline grids, new contour options, tabs and drop caps. * A new table feature to create basic tables within Scribus. * Extended support for right to left languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. Scribus is now translated into 25 languages with more to come.

The Scribus Team wishes to thank the many contributions and support we have received from users, bug reporters and packagers who have helped to bring Scribus to a new level.

Downloads, docs and sample files at : http://www.scribus.net and http://www.scribus.org.uk Bug reports and feature requests: http://bugs.scribus.net