The Scribus Team is pleased to announce a technology preview of the next generation of Scribus - Open Source Desktop Publishing.

The aim for this release is to bring improvements and enhancements for both professionals and beginning users alike. 1.3.0 improves Scribus' abilities in areas like performance, accessibility and workflow. With this release, we also commence support for Scribus running natively on Windows and Mac OS X.

While it is very stable and usable, there are a number of under the hood changes which will continue through the 1.3.x series

* Work is on-going to make Scribus more platform independent and alpha quality builds of Scribus are already working on Win32 and Mac OS X. A native Mac OS X build is available here: http://aqua.scribus.net

* There is a new undo system, which includes an undo palette that has the undo history with details of each action. Undo also has object specific capabilities. The number of undo/redo steps can be set in the preferences.

* Revised document and application preferences. Extensive attention has been placed on making preferences easier to use with document and application preferences distinctly separated.

* Scribus now has "scratch space" which can be used to store objects partially or fully off the page.

* Scribus can now generate Tables of Contents, based on user definable/selectable attributes.

* Scribus now has its own built-in pre-flight verifier for printing or exporting to PDF. The pre-flighter is designed to look for issues which might cause problems when printing or exporting PDF.

* More professional DTP features like adding ciceros for measurement units and support. Scribus now has true facing page support and page objects such as images can span them.

* Scribus now has more extensive support for CMYK images, as well as clipping paths in TIFF files, CMYK-JPEG, as well as new support for native Photoshop ® PSD files. 16-bit RGB/CMYK TIFF and PSD support will follow soon. ICC color management of for these image formats is also upgraded.

* New image effect features including tinting, greyscaling, blurring, colorizing and sharpening.

* Scribus 1.3.0 now supports PDF 1.5 features including layers in PDF.

* Scribus 1.3.0 uses an intermediary file format based on the Scribus 1.2.x format. The new format to finally replace this intermediary format is in design and development stages and its implementation will begin soon.

For future development versions, we will be announcing competitions for icon sets and splashscreens.

The Scribus Team would also like to thank Anduin.net/Øverby Consulting and n@...859... GmbH, Hamburg for gracefully sponsoring our Scribus Documentation site, our Bug Tracker and Anonymous CVS server. Also, a note of thanks to University of Salford - School of Media, Music and Performance for providing continued hosting of www.scribus.net and upgrading the server hardware.

Getting Scribus 1.3.0

You can: Download from our Sourceforge page: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=125235

Download from: http://www.scribus.org.uk/

Get the MacOSX build from: http://aqua.scribus.net

Screenshots: http://scribus.sourceforge.net/gallery/