Table of Contents

Comppiling with Microsoft Visual Studio

  • These instructions are for 1.5.5svn or newer.
  • They may be adapted for building 1.4.x but they have not been tested (you will then need Qt 4).
  • You will need msvc2015/2017 to compile Scribus (msvc2013 has not been tested).

At the end we will be giving some hints for alternative setups, but this tutorial assume that:

  • You're using Windows 10 in english.
  • You Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition with the VC++ 2015 tools.
  • You install Qt 5.9.7 for MSVC 2015 64 bit.
  • You compile Scribus in Release (and eventually Debug) mode for Windows 10 64 bit.

TODO: check if Qt 5.10.1 also works.

1. Prerequisites

  1. You will need a recent version of Microsoft Windows (Vista, 7 or newer).
  2. Obtain and install Microsoft visual studio 2017 community edition (for free).
    • Among the options you'll need at least the "Desktop development C++" with the "VC++ 2015 tools" and the "Windows 10 SDK".
  3. Obtain and install the most recent Qt 5.9.x and make sure to install the msvc2015 component for you PC architecture (32/64 bit).
    • You can skip the creation of a Qt Account
    • Qt is typically installed in C:\Qt\Qt5.9.7 (in the rest of the document this will be referred to as "qt-install-dir")
    • You will probably not want to "associate common file types with Qt Creator"
    • From the "Qt" (not "Preview") components, pick the latest Qt of the 5.9 serie with (at least) the modules:
    • MSVC 2015 64-bit
    • Qt WebEngine (maybe, for the help...)
  4. A Git client (GitAhead, Github client, Git from the command line, ...)
  5. The 7-Zip open source archive utility for Windows available at https://www.7-zip.org/

2. Get the Scribus sources

  1. Create a directory in which you will be building Scribus: C:\Documents\Development\Scribus-1.5
    In the rest of the document this will be referred to as the "scribus-root-path".
  2. Obtain the source code of Scribus:
    • From the official Scribus official SVN repository:
      svn checkout svn://scribus.net/trunk/Scribus scribus
    • Or from one of the the community managed Git repository:
      git clone https://gitlab.com/scribus/scribus.git
      git clone https://github.com/scribusproject/scribus.git
  3. You should now have a Documents\Development\Scribus-1.5\scribus folder containing the Scribus sources.

3. Get the third party dependency package

The scribus development team provides packages with all the third party dependencies needed to build scribus. For compiling 1.5.x,you need:

You should get the latest available files.

4. Extracting the third party dependencies

Next extract the two archives. It is important that they both are in the same folder.

  • Create the sub folder "Scribus Libs" in the "scribus-root-path" ("scribus-root-path\Scribus Libs").
  • Extract the "scribus-common-libs" folder from the scribus-commmon-libs-YYYYMMDD.7z into this directory.
  • Extract the "scribus-1.5.x-libs-msvc2015" folder from scribus-15x-libs-msvcXXXX-YYYYMMDD.7z into the same directory

  • The directory structure should look like:

    scribus-root-path
   Scribus Libs 
       scribus-1.5.x-libs-msvc2015
       scribus-common-libs

5. Compile the Scribus library dependencies

After having extracted the 3rd party dependencies:

  • Open with Visua Studio the Visual Studio Solution file (*.sln) located in the scribus-1.5.x-libs-* directory
    • If you get the question to upgrade the SDK version and the Platform Toolset, pick "No upgrade for both".
  • In the toolbar pick the debug or release configurations for the x64 platform, then run Build > Build Solution