My personal roadmap for Scribus 1.6

Scribus 1.5svn: a we're working hard...

Recently, I've been asked several times, what the plans are for the release of Scribus 1.6. While I'm not aware of a detailed roadmap, I feel that there is a tacit consensus on two goals:

start the stabilization phase around the beginnings of automn 2012 and release Scribus 1.6 at some time in spring 2013.
get some more usability and productivity improvements into Scribus 1.6

This been said, here is a features list that I -- from a UI and productivity point of view -- wish, that could make it into Scribus 1.5svn before it gets into the stabilization phase:

one single status bar (I'm working on it)
split of the Properties palette in Content and Frame palette (Jean is working on it)
get the Content and Frame palette to be context sensitive (Jean is working on it)
work on the UI/UX aspects of the new palettes (can partially be done during the stabilization phase)
create guides based on the selected element (a script?)
make the search dialog non modal
replacing text in the whole document (Cezary is working on it)
footnotes (Cezary has almost finished the work)
style based table of contents (Cezary is working on it)
complete the undo (Pierrick has been working hard on it)
complete the new Scripter (Jain is working on it)
variable text markers (date, document title, ...; Cezary is working on it)
keyboard shortcuts for styles (Cezary is working on it)
a smart hyphen at the beginning of the word should avoid its hyphenation (Cezary is working on it)
support character styles when importing text
keep basic formatting (italics, subscripts and superscript...) for text imorted from .odt and .html files
recognize italic and bold as such
export to epub (I'm working on it)
a better handling of click through the layers (I'm working on it)
partially clean up the toolbars (Claudia is working on a proposal)
a more consistent (and pleasant?) icons set (Vladimir is working on it)
import PDFs into the current file and avoid opening them as a file
protect the guides from the master page from being edited on the page
right clicking on the overflow box should show a context menu
option to "remove the overflowing text"
(items below added, or promoted from 1.8, on September 26)
a solution for simple imposition (Jos is working on it)
support for indic languages (Anil is working on it)
bullet lists (Cezary is working on it)
shortcuts for styles (Cezary has made a patch)

Lot of thinkgs to be done in the next two months! But most of the features described above are already quite advanced, so I still hope that my dreams come true!

While compiling the list above I had lot of ideas floating in my head, and -- for sure -- not all could fit in. So here some ideas about I would like to see in Scribus 1.8, if they don't magically make it into 1.6:

clean up the toolbars
unified ressource manager (styles, colors, fonts ...)
unified transform tool (size, rotation ...)
unified content loader (Pierrick is working on it)
new UI and interaction for editing the shape
improvements to the Preflight verifier
a more logical palette of colors (choosing among RGB and CMYK as a default for the document)
more work on the concept of master pages
frame styles and other types of styles
better support for the typographic grid (allow the descender to extend outside of the frame; calculation based on the margins and the baseline grid)
finish the work on the new text layout (ScribusOIF branch...)
an interface for managing the typographic color
create an info panel
allow layers to be local to a (master) page
links as text and frame properties
apply formatting on several selected items
adding a path for fonts in the preferences should load the fonts without needing a scribus restart
attach font directories to documents (optionally relative paths)
allow relative paths for external ressources (images, fonts; probably with a contraint that they must be in or under the directory containing the .sla)
check if the (improved) fancy gimp input/slider box can and/or should be ported to scribus
headless scribus
more granular display refreshing and multithreading
better, on canvas, editing of path's nodes
align and distribute for nodes

After having compiled this list, I've also been asked what bothers me most when working with Scribus and I would see being fixed in 1.6. Here is my personal "egoistic" list:

guides on master pages should not be editable on the page
a style palette with non modal "editors" (but i'm not sure we should do it for 1.6)
finishing the pdf import
getting the experimental tag away from the PDF embedding
complete the new scripter
and fixing the importing of italics, sup and sub.

Finally, since I've started compiling this list, slightly more than a month ago, several things have improved in Scribus and not all of my requests still match the reality... But this will be discussed in future articles!