aoloe / scribus-newsletter

monthly newsletter about scribus development

The Scribus Community Newsletter

Weekly Monthly newsletter about the Scribus development development, the new features and all the nice things published with it.

The newsletter will be translated in multiple languages and published on

• The Scribus mailing list (english)
• http://impagina.org (english)
• http://scribus-user.de/forum (german)
• http://www.linuxgraphic.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=20 (french)
• ...

If you want to add items, just fork it and make pull requests.

Helpful resources:

• http://lists.scribus.net/pipermail/scribus-commit/
• http://bugs.scribus.net/view_all_bug_page.php

Possible sections:

• Out of the presses
• New features
• Bug fixed
• Ongoing development
• Ongoing discussions

Contributing

Skills

What we most need:

• People with good writing skills, who can put a bit more of glamour around the naked facts.
• ... some help in collecting facts...
• People creating screenshots, sceencasts, and sample documents showing the new features.

How to contribute

Issues are discussed and prepared in the issue tracker on Github:

https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-newsletter/issues

There will be one ticket for each issue of the newsletter.

You can add your contributions in there or learn how to use Github to edit and push the files.

Since it's not possible to upload files to the issue tracker -- if you're not cloning the repository locally -- you will have to make the files available in some other way on the net and link them from the the specific ticket.

Contributions can be in any language.

How to use Github

• Go to http://github.com.
• If you don't have an account click on the green link "Sign up for free" and create an account.
• Go to https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-newsletter/ and for fork the repository
  
• You can now browse through the files which are now in your repository, open the markdown file in the current edition and edit it by clicking on the edit button:
  
• Once you have finished editing the file, just make a "pull request" (there is a button for it), which will notify me that there I need to integrate your contribution into the Newsletter

Of course, if you know about git and github, after having forked the repository, you can edit your files locally and then make a pull request.

scribus-newsletter's Issues

collaborative writing

the first issue has been written in a titanpad, but is more than suboptimal since it does not support markdown and it forces it's own html formatting that is not possible to copy over as text only.

any idea for a better (and free!) solution?

November 2016

• how to setup / use hyphenation and spell checking
• introduce text patterns and a workaround script for 1.4
• i am chief editor of a photo magazine, layouter as well. i use scribus and mentionned it in the acknowledgments. maybe we can show on your page what we do.
  hern42 (15:15) a-l-e: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hern42/28920796113/ (hern42 @ gmail)
• explaining the "output intended for" in the PDF export dialog.

October 2015

This time it will get out!

• news
  • the new icon set (with interview)
  • present the command line enhancement
  • announce 1.4.6 (if released before the newsletter gets out)
• testimonials
• Requests for participation
  • a new scripter has been in the working for a long time. currently we're stuck at porting the new engine from qt4 to qt5 and more exactly at the point where we have to connect real signal and slots across the boundaries between c++ and python by using pyqt5.
  • Looking for a Web designer for the Scribus Community Asknot
• Internal
  • look for designers to do a PDF version of this / the newsletter
  • looking for translations
  • present the types of contribution that people can propose for the newsletter

Proofreading:

• ...

If possible, please tell us (if possible by commenting in this ticket) when you start proofreading, so that people know about it and we as little duplicated work as possible.

Translations:

• ...

If possible, please tell us (if possible by commenting in this ticket) when you start a translation, so people can collaborate and translations are not started in parallel.
You're welcome to announce partial translations!

List of filler topics

• Undo/Redo
• ScribusCTL
• Search & Replace
• Pyside2
• UI/UX

Releases

@aoloe (CC @GarryPatchett)
Here's my proposal:

1. We make a quarterly newsletter released by Scribus Volunteers.
2. We operate a blog (on scribus.io using the jekyll framework so it's easy) to report updates about Scribus

Function of the quarterly is to show:

• Kickass feature of Scribus that can be done with the software. For example, some of the neat stuff that @GarryPrachett has been fiddling with.
• Announce community efforts to support Scribus like Translations, Patch Submissions, Educating developers about the source code.
• Having one volunteer give a presentation to the community at large about an aspect of Scribus
• Talking about future features that would benefit Scribus

Function of the Blog is:

• to keep the community at large updated about what's happening in Scribus development. Basically what dev.scribus.net used to be but not maintained by the devs. We can quickly share what bug fixes were made. What efforts are being undertaken by individuals in the community at large. etc..etc..

July 2015

will be published end of june 2015

topics:

• release of 1.5.0
  • explaining a bit what it means, what are 1.5.0, 1.5.1, trunk...
  • announce that we will present the new features
  • what will for sure be done until 1.6.0 (PP)
  • who should/could use 1.5.x and what are the dangers
• announce scribusCTL by andreas vox and arabic support
• http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=12920 (Scribus should ensure fonts are either embeded or outlined)
• announce the inofficial ScribusAPI

add a graph with statistics about scribus?

• commits per week / day
• bug opened / fixed
• posts in the ML, forum, G+, twitter

February 2016

topics

this is a list of all topics, already covered or to be covered

• launch script and to-pdf from the command line (10.2015)
• the 1.5.1 icons set (10.2015)
• improvements to the text frames linking in 1.5.x
• a python script for creating calendars (https://www.scribus-user.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&p=3087#p3087)
• a python script for numbered "cards" (https://www.scribus-user.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=281)

November 2015

This is the planing for the November issue.

• Top/bottom border with styles
• order of layers from master pages and pages (page numbers!)
• announcing 1.4.6 (if thas been released before the release of this newsletter)
• Testimonials (#7 (comment))
  1. https://twitter.com/mrsannarichards/status/652927975038566401
  2. https://twitter.com/hujraad/status/656464642265489408
  3. https://twitter.com/hujraad/status/657189299385978880

August 2015

• 1.5.0 status and features
  • the ressource managers
• present the characterstics of the new scripter (if at some time end of june it will already be working)

Structure

This is a draft structure for the Scribus Community Newsletter
We can use to this structure to setup a new issue of the newsletter and contributors can look up the content we would like to get (of course new sections can be created!)

• News
  • Interesting bugs/features worked on in the bugtracker
  • Interesting topics discussed on the ML/Forums/Social Media
• Tutorial Section
  • Not more than one short tutorial per newsletter
• Testimonials
  -Tweets, G+ posts, etc...
• Requests for participation
• Feature of the many side project
• You might not know that...

publishing workflow

creating an issue

• until the 10th of the month: decide the list of topics
• until the 20th of the month: get all the articles to be written
• before the end of the month: prepare screenshots, proofreading, start translations

publishing an issue

• create the directory on github for the next issue
• on http://impagina.org
  • add a page for the new newsletter
  • upload the images to data/uploads/
  • add the new newsletter as html
  • remove the formatting and links after the <h#>
  • fix the img src to point to the local version of the images
  • remove the formatting from github
  • source code can be manually highlighted with http://tohtml.com/shell/ (is it not possible to do it on github itself?)
  • replace the previous version on the main newsletter/ page
• announce on
  • twitter
  • g+
  • mailing list
  • forum
  • http://scribus-user.de/forum
  • http://www.linuxgraphic.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=20
• publish the german version on http://scribus-user.de/forum
• publish the italian version on ubuntu-it / bar ubuntu and http://www.istitutomajorana.it/forum2/

December 2015

Proposals for the December issue of the Scribus community newsletter.

Proposed topics:

• Tutorial: A case for using Crop Marks & how to do it (tbc)
• Interview with the House of Open Source, HOST-Oman (tbc)
• How to setup a developer environment on different platforms to develop Scribus (see #16 (comment))
• YT Tutorial: How to align images in a frame
• Tutorial: using the item's blend mode to make the text stickout from the background.
• Eventually release of 1.4.6
• 3 Testimonials
• Crowdfunding ?

A PDF version

• We can bring in designers each issue that can modify the template with their own spin
• Each design object can be then saved in to a repetoire that people can use to build their own newsletter from

Translations

We can translate the newsletter via Transifex.
Then we can modify @chhitz script to automate that process

January 2016

Proposals for the January issue of the Scribus community newsletter.

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questions for a future interview?

• what will users discover about you when using scribus
• What Open Source software do you use?
• Have you used scribus before this project?
• Please present yourself to the Scribus Community...
• What motivated you to contribute to a Free Libre Open Source Software project?
• What would be your "Things I’d like to see Scribus do well" priority list look like?
• What issues on that list are you planning to volunteer doing?
• How would you like to see others further contribute?
• Where would you like to see the Scribus headed and how do you propose getting there?

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