This repository is a collection of patches that I apply on top of my version of Scribus to add a few features I miss. Feel free to use them as well, but be aware that they are very specific to the way I use Scribus, and that they should be considered incomplete (e.g. missing undo/redo functionality, sub-par UI, etc.)
This is a work-in-progress port of my old patches to a modern version (1.6.2 at the time of writing) of Scribus. You can find the originals at https://github.com/balpha/scribus-patches-13. Some of the old ones are no longer necessary, and there's also some new ones here.
Since I like to tightly control the hyphenation of text, I often manually add soft hyphens (U+00AD) to my text. These characters are usually invisible, which makes this manual work hard to manage. This patch makes the soft hypens visible inside the story editor by displaying them as red dashes (similar to how other special characters like frame breaks are displayed).
I have been using drop shadows (I called them "soft shadows") for over a decade in Scribus 1.3 and 1.4 using my patches. That functionality was eventually added natively to Scribus (based on my patch) in Scribus 1.5, but of course when loading a file that was created with an old version, current Scribus doesn't load the drop shadow data because in "real" old files, this feature didn't exist yet.
This patch updates the scribus134 loader to also load drop shadow data, so that I can load my old files correctly.
Scribus allows for text to flow around an arbitrary object by setting one of the corresponding options in the properties palette's "Shape" tab. However this only works if the flow-around object sits above the text box (either on a higher layer, or on the same layer but higher than the text). Since I sometimes need the text to flow around objects that are on a lower layer, this patch adds a new column of checkboxes to the layer palette (disabled by default).
When you enable this setting on a layer, any text on this layer will flow around all objects that have a "text flows around" setting, regardless of whether these objects sit above or below the text. To clarify: You set this property on the layer that contains the text, not the flow-around object.
When changing this setting, you may have to force Scribus to re-flow the affected text boxes by moving them (just press left arrow then right arrow) or by saving and re-opening the document.
Note that this, too, is a file format change. If you save a .sla document where you have enabled this setting for a layer, then open and re-save this document with an unpatched version of Scribus, the setting will be disabled even if you later open the file in the patched version again. Because vanilla Scribus doesn't know about this feature, it ignores the "text always flows" settings when opening a document, and does not persist them when re-saving it.
This patch allows you to disable automatic hyphenation of a single word in a text by prepending it with a soft hyphen (U+00AD). If I recall correctly (it's been a long time), this is how InDesign does it.
This patch allows changing the orientation of an image in steps of 90 degrees without having to rotate the image frame. Scribus 1.5+ has this feature built in (with arbitrary angles), but 1.4.x didn't, and I have lots of files that make use of this patch. And because my orientation functionality cannot be easily converted to the native rotation functionality (because you'd need the dimensions of the image), I'm just keeping it around, even though I now have two ways to rotate images inside the image frame.
While true for all these patches, this one especially is tailored to my use case: Easier handling of photos (in formats like TIF, PNG, JPEG) that aren't present in the proper orientation, and PDF output. I use Scribus exclusively for print design, so all I ever do is create PDFs. Therefore, just like with the soft shadows, I can't promise that this e.g. works with all exporters. It also does not or may not work correctly when the image is an embedded PDF or other special-case format.
Also note that this is a fairly new patch and thus I may not have found all issues yet.
Finally this, too, is a file format change. If you save a .sla document where you have changed an image's orientation, then open and re-save this document with an unpatched version of Scribus, the orientation will be back to zero even if you later open the file in the patched version again. Because vanilla Scribus doesn't know about this feature, it ignores the orientation setting when opening a document, and does not persist it when re-saving it.
This patch adds a new image effect called "Auto contrast".
The default settings for this effect do almost precisely the same thing as GIMP's "auto white balance". Discarding (thus clipping) the top and bottom 0.5% of the pixels, it stretches the red, green, and blue color channels to the full range. This can do magic to enhance photographs, in particular when they're tinted towards a certain color. And it can also do horrible things, depending on the image, so be sure to look at the actual result.
The effect has a few options:
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Threshold low and Threshold high: This is the percentage of the image's pixels that are discarded when calculating the range of color values. As mentioned above, the default is 0.5% for both, but this can be adjusted indepently for dark (low) and light (high) values. If, for example, your photo has a large over-exposed area (that you may be cropping away anyway), you'll probably want to increase the high threshold.
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Sync colors: If this is checked, then instead of adjusting the color channels independently, the low and high values will be identical for all three color channels (using the lowest low value and the highest high value). This means that there will be no color correction (or distortion); rather this will just increase the image contrast.
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Amount: Controls the strenght of the effect from 100% (the default) to 0% (no change at all).
This effect only works on RGB images. Frankly, I've never used CMYK images, and I have now idea how I would treat them for applying this effect. In particular this means that this effect won't do anything when exporting CYMK PDFs unless you also apply the "effects before color management" patch (see its description for the reason).
This is not technically a file format change, however I have not tested how Scribus behaves when a file contains an unknown image effect. Thus opening and/or re-saving a .sla file that contains this effect with an unpatched version of Scribus may have unintended consequences.
When using color management, Scribus applies image effects after converting the image to the target colorspace. This is very unfortunate, because it makes image effects combined with color management (especially soft proofing) utterly useless. There's a very old bug report on this matter.
This patch changes this order; image effects are applied on the original image data as loaded from the file; only then are any color conversions applied. Scribus' loading of TIFF and PSD files is a bit special here; color conversion happens at the same time as loading the image. I don't know the reasoning behind this, and right now this is only partially handled. If you work with TIFF or PSD files, you probably don't want to use this.
If you use both color management and image effects, this patch is a major change, and it's not hidden behind a setting -- all your files will suddenly behave differently. So make very sure you want to apply it.
When you have a document with a lot of images, especially when using color management, then loading the file or changing color management settings can take quite some time, and often trigger "The application is not responding" warnings.
This patch makes no performance improvements, but it does make the experience better in the following ways:
- prevent the "not responding" warning
- when recalculating images, make the progress bar more representative of elapsed and expected time
- represent the initial image recalc that happens during loading of color managed documents in the progress bar
A note on the third bullet: When opening a document that uses color management, Scribus will load every image twice. Here's the corresponding bug report. This patch does not fix this (it would be a pretty big change, given how image loading works behind the scenes). But it makes this bit more bearable, especially for documents with lots of images, by reflecting it in the progress indicator the status bar. That means the bar will fill up to 100% twice when loading a (color-managed) document. But at least there's no minute-long pause during which you have no idea what's happening.
When an image frame already contains a picture and you load a new one, Scribus resets the image's scaling and position. This patch changes this behavior in the following way: If the image frame is set to manual scaling (not fit-to-frame), then instead of resetting, the scale and position are adjusted by the ratios of the old image's width/height and the new image's width/height.
The use case for this is replacing a picture with another picture that has the same content but different dimensions (for example, a higher-resolution scan of the same photo). With this patch, the new image would be cropped and scaled to show exactly what the old image did.
If you replace an image with an unrelated image (and the frame uses manual scaling), the resulting scale and offset therefore won't make much sense, but a) this is probably rare, and b) with Scribus' built-in behavior, chances are that the values aren't the desired ones either, and thus you'd have to adjust them in either case.
I have this small issue where on my multi-monitor setup, palettes often open on the incorrect screen after restarting Scribus. This small bug seems to be fixed in the Scribus trunk, but in Scribus 1.6 it still exists, so this patch fixes the problem for me.
After moving an object via the properties palette, Scribus redraws the whole window, but after moving an object with the arrow keys, it only redraws the immediate area of that object. That may not be enough, especially if the object (or one close by) has a drop shadow, and can cause artifacts.
This patch modifies this behaviour such that when moving objects with the arrows, the whole window is redrawn as well. This causes things to look correctly, but it does come with a noticable performance degradation.
Scribus itself is copyright 2001–2024 Franz Schmid and rest of the members of the Scribus Team and for the most part licensed under GPLv2+. See their file COPYING for details.
These patches ("the program") are copyright 2008-2024 Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.