1 Public release of LyX version 1.5.0 (release candidate 2)
2 ===================================
4 We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.5.0 (release candidate 2).
5 We expect this to be the last release before 1.5.0, and until the
6 first stable release only critical bugs and regressions will be
9 We encourage users to try this release candidate and report
10 any feedback or problems to lyx-devel at lists.lyx.org.
12 Compared with the first release candidate we have mostly fixed bugs
13 and polished the graphical interface.
15 Compared with the latest stable release, this is the culmination of
16 one year of hard work, and we sincerely hope you will enjoy the
17 results. The changes are too numerous to summarize in a few words,
18 with initial unicode support being the flagship among the new
19 features, see the end of this announcement for details.
21 As usual with a major release, a lot of work that is not directly
22 visible has taken place. The core of LyX has seen more cleanups and
23 some of the new features are the direct results of this work.
25 The file RELEASE-NOTES lists some known issues with this release
26 compared to the latest stable release (LyX 1.4.4). An updated list of
27 issues might later be found at http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/ReleaseNotes
30 In case you are wondering what LyX is, here is what
31 http://www.lyx.org/ has to say on the subject:
33 LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing
34 based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. It
35 is released under a Free Software / Open Source license.
37 LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great,
38 right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting
39 details, 'finger painting' font attributes or futzing around with page
40 boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth's legendary
41 TeX typesetting engine makes you look good.
43 On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output -- or
44 richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced -- looks like
45 nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all
46 looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably
47 different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes 'eating'
48 your dissertation the evening before going to press.
50 LyX is stable and fully featured. It is a multi-platform, fully
51 internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the
52 Macintosh and modern Windows platforms.
54 You can download LyX 1.5.0rc1 here (the .bz2 are compressed with
55 bzip2, which yields smaller files):
57 ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-1.5.0rc1.tar.gz
58 ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-1.5.0rc1.tar.bz2
60 Note that due to the amount of changes no patch is provided to upgrade
63 Prebuilt binaries (rpms for linux distributions, Mac OS X and Windows
64 installers) should soon be available at
65 ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/
67 As confusing as it is, two sets of installers are available to windows
68 users: LyX-1.5.0rc1-Installer.exe, LyX-1.5.0rc1-Installer-bundle.exe and
69 LyX-1.5.0rc1-AltInstaller.exe, LyX-1.5.0rc1-AltInstaller-Complete.exe.
70 The former is our official installer and the latter is previously known
71 as LyXWinInstaller. Please feel free to try either of them. Feedbacks
72 and bug reports on both installers are welcome because they will help
73 the merge of two installers, which is expected to happen during the
74 1.5.x series of LyX development.
76 If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.5.0rc1, you may either
77 e-mail the LyX developers' mailing list (lyx-devel @ lists.lyx.org), or open
78 a bug report at http://bugzilla.lyx.org
80 If you're having trouble using the new version of LyX, or have a question,
81 first check out http://www.lyx.org/help/. If you can't find the answer there,
82 e-mail the LyX users' list (lyx-users @ lists.lyx.org).
89 What's new in version 1.5.0 (release candidate 1)?
90 ----------------------------
94 LyX 1.5's big goal was to use unicode internally and so resolve a slew
95 of existing problems with special characters and non-alphabetic
96 languages. LyX 1.5 is able to output unicode (in addition to
97 encodings current available), so that you can use LaTeX's new utf8
98 encoding or such brand new typesetting systems as XeTeX.
99 Since the change to unicode touched much of the code base and some
100 areas still need a cleanup it is very likely that some bugs related to
101 the unicode transition still exist. Please have a look at the Known
102 bugs in LyX 1.5 page if you encounter a bug that seems to be related
103 to unicode. If it's not there, then please report it to the lyx-devel
106 * Integrated CJK support
108 The very first result of the Unicode transition is that we have finally
109 merged in the externally maintained CJK-LyX branch.
110 The languages Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are now supported in
112 Note that from now on, former encoding settings for these languages
113 done via ERT or the document preamble will lead to LaTeX-errors!
117 Besides the CJK languages, the languages Armenian and Farsi are now
118 supported in the user interface.
120 * Multiple views of the same buffer
122 LyX can now display multiple views of the same buffer. I.e., you can
123 now open a single document in multiple windows and work on different
124 parts of it synchronously.
126 * Outliner and embedded TOC
128 LyX has another long-awaited feature: a basic outliner mode, in which
129 you can move chapters and sections around in the Table of Contents
130 dialog. (The outliner has been backported and was released with LyX
131 1.4.4.) The TOC dialog is now a dock widget, embedded in the main window.
135 LyX is now able to remember window size and position and it will
136 reopen the documents you worked on last time around. If you've
137 selected the feature in the Preferences dialog, it'll even move the
138 cursor to the place you were working on last! Furthermore, toolbars
139 can (finally!) be switched on/off in View->Toolbars and moved about in
140 the LyX window. The session management will remember their state.
144 As a kind of "anti-preview-latex", a dialog was implemented that lets
145 you view the source code of a given paragraph/selection or the whole
148 * New Font Selection Interface
150 LyX's font selection abilities have been one of its weakest and most
151 outdated components. A completely new interface was implemented that
152 provides access to the power of LaTeX's font selection scheme.
156 LyX's table support is certainly less powerful than that of
157 LaTeX. support for the booktabs package was implemented, which
158 provides beautiful and elegant tabulars.
162 Native LyX support for the nomencl package was implemented. With this,
163 you can treat your document with all sorts of nomenclatures,
164 glossaries and fancy notations.
168 LyX now uses tabbed widgets to display multiple documents.
170 * Enhanced Math Toolbars
172 The math toolbar was enhanced significantly. Drop down menus were
173 added, that allowed to integrate all of the math panel' content to the
175 Since this input method is much easier than the clumsy panel, the math
176 panel itself has been removed and superseded by the toolbars.
180 LyX 1.5 will use the Qt4 toolkit. This is especially good news for
181 Windows users, since there's an official, GPL version of Qt4. They no
182 longer have to rely on an unofficial port of the Unix Qt3 library to
183 Windows. The good old XForms frontend went the way of the dodo. It
184 was both hated and loved, and certainly shaped the unique look of LyX
185 in the past. It was finally killed off, however, by the switch to
186 unicode. The Qt3 frontend was removed. The work on the GTK frontend
187 has been transferred to a branch because its development has
190 * Change tracking enhancements
192 Major parts of the change tracking code were rewritten addressing
193 several problems that existed in the existing implementation.
195 * Converter file cache
197 A cache for converted files, such as included figures, was
198 implemented. This can speed up LyX's performance considerably when
199 displaying documents with many included figures that need conversion
200 to a format that can be rendered on screen. The converter file cache
201 is enabled by default.
203 The default maximum age of a cached file is 6 months. You can change
206 \converter_cache_maxage xxx
208 where xxx is the maximum age in seconds, in your preferences file.
210 * Unified Windows installer
212 The two windows installers are being merged and bug reports regarding
213 both installers are welcome.
217 The traditional way to insert program listings in LyX involves the use
218 of the LyX-Code style. This option works quite well for short snippets but
219 does not support in-line code segments or the inclusion of external files.
221 Using the listings latex package as the backend a new inset was added that
222 supports all these three ways of listing computer programs.
224 * LaTeX-package support
226 LyX provides the following new document classes:
227 - article(IOP) - for scientific papers published by the IOP group
228 - presentation(powerdot) - for presentations using the powerdot package
229 - curriculum vitae(Europe) - for CVs following the guidelines of the EU
230 - curriculum vitae(modern) - for CVs using the moderncv package
231 - curriculum vitae(simple) - for simple CVs
233 * Minor user interface improvements
235 Apart from the described major changes, several minor improvements of
236 the user interface have been made, such as:
238 - Syntax highlighting for the user preamble and the LaTeX log file
239 - Better parsing of BibTeX databases (in the citation dialog)
240 - Support optional argument for environments
242 * Enhanced clipboard/selection handling
244 Clipboard has been tuned to work better with other applications. Parallel
245 to clipboard usages, the *nix way of using middle-button to paste
246 selected text is enhanced, and is also available under windows (but
247 within lyx only). Selection of lyx text is now persistent in that
248 you can paste the selected text using middle button multiple times,
249 even after the selection has been cleared.
253 As usual, one big task has been the ongoing code cleanup of the LyX
254 core. Performing this cleanup makes the code more understandable and
255 easier to maintain. It also leads inevitably to a more robust
256 application. Nonetheless, it's an unfortunate fact of life that ugly
257 code is sometimes faster than pretty code. We're well aware that LyX
258 1.4 is slower than LyX 1.3. One important goal of this 1.5 development
259 series has been to bring this speed back.
263 Lots of long-lasting bugs have been fixed, as documented in LyX
264 bugzilla. Probably some new ones have been introduced instead ;-)