[scribus] The Scribus 2018 year in review

[ale rimoldi]

Hey

During the last few days I've seen several projects publishing a year
review and I thought: why not doing the same for Scribus?

Here is a copy of my review of the year 2018 for Scribus.



2018 was a calm year for Scribus. There have been one minor release for
both the stable and the development branches, regular bug fixes, and a
couple of bigger refactoring efforts.

Some of the highlights for 2018 were:

- Scribus 1.5.4 has been released, with a few
  enhancements relating to the color handling and improvements for
  running Scribus from the command line.
  (https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/1.5.4_Release)

- There has been a regain of interest for the scripting, leading a few
  new contributors (dockattt, Iam_TJ, gibbz) to submit patches. Missing
  commands have been added to the API and a few misbehaving ones have
  been fixed.

- Cédric Gémy's has published "Initiation à Scribus 1.5" for
  Flossmanuals:
  https://boutique.flossmanualsfr.net/home/12-scribus-9791090791411.html
  Go and buy it or help translating it!

- Norbert has created "Scribus Templates" a site with dozen of
  Scribus sample documents:
  https://www.scribus-templates.net

- On top of fixing bugs, Craig and Jean worked on code improvements
  that should make Scribus better in the long term:
  - Refactoring efforts to make the Scribus code more readable (return
  early) and fast (const &)
  - "Moving" to C++ 11 (foreach, nullptr, auto)
  - Fix "clazy" warnings and generally "fight" compilers warning
  (signed / unsigned, ...)

For 2019 there are a few ongoing projects that could need some care and
love:

- One and a half years ago, Martin (with the help of a few forum
  users) made a proposal for a new Scribus website. It has not been
  retained by the Scribus team and since I really loved the work he
  did, I've now created a "Scribus Community Site" based on it:

  http://impagina.org

  It's still in beta stage and contributions are very welcome!

- Cedric's "Scribus 1.5" book is free and it is being translated
  into English. Further translations would be very welcome!

- More of the IndigoDock UI proposal (Martin again) should get into
  Scribus.

- Finish the "friendly" API for Scribus plugins.

- Complete and publish the Epub exporter.

- Create a real table of contents based on styles.

- Propose a new scripter engine.




I wish you all and Scribus a wonderful 2019!
a.l.e