Two branches of Scribus

It has been a while since my last post but finally I got an idea about an article to help people who are thinking about starting a layout job in Scribus. I will hopefully make it a bit easier to select the right version to download.

Stable Branch
There are two branches of Scribus. Version number 1.3.3.x is called the stable branch and is recommend for anybody with tight deadlines. Stable in Scribus world means that the version is tested and used enough for Scribus team to release it with adjective stable. No new features come into the stable branch only bugs will be fixed.

The most recent stable version released is 1.3.3.12. With the stable branch it is pretty safe to choose the version currently under development (1.3.3.13svn) since there will be only bug fixes in there. If you feel the version numbering is a bit odd just think about it as a lame joke. Without this numbering scheme it would have not been possible to release a version with a number 1.3.3.7.

Development Branch
The most fun in software development is implementation of new features. All new features in Scribus will first land into the development branch. The current development branch is the version 1.3.5svn. Svn in the version number indicates that it has not been released yet but is still under active development.

The last released development branch version is 1.3.4 which is totally outdated already. This is why you should prefer the svn version of 1.3.5. With the development branch things usually are a bit more unstable than one would expect but that is acceptable since the development branch is not meant to be used for production work. The idea behind development branch releases is to get the new features tested and fine tuned before turning the development branch into a new stable branch.

It is not guaranteed that a development branch will turn into a stable branch after a release. Currently the next development branch release will be 1.3.5 but it is still possible that the version after it, 1.3.6, will also be a development release where some more new features will come into play and 1.3.5 features will be optimized.

What's there more in the development branch?

• Character Styles
• Better Shaped Paragraphs*
• Some other nice features
  
• QT4
  
• Crashes (probably)
• A wish that people will use the latest version from svn trunk and report about their problems after checking the bug tracker at http://bugs.scribus.net

* Scribus can finally create nicely shaped paragraphs without huge white paths. With the current stable version shaping the paragraph perfectly needed a lot of manual tweaking. With the 1.3.5svn there are optical margins, glyph extensions and word tracking there to help achieving the perfect shape more easily.

The left paragraph in the picture below has been created with the settings from the stable branch. On the right automatic help has been turned on with the 1.3.5svn version.


Optical margins help aligning the right and left sides of a paragraph into a perfect line hanging the small glyphs at the end of the lines (on the left).

So which one should I choose?

With a work to do you should probably go with the stable branch. With the development branch you may hit issues that may delay the work seriously. If however you do not care about deadlines or are free of them 1.3.5svn will be a great way to participate in Scribus development. More eyes we get for the bug hunting better product we will get and if you are a developer remember to submit patches with your bug reports.