1 Public release of LyX version 1.4.0
2 ===================================
4 We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.4.0.
6 It is the culmination of 3 years of hard work, and we sincerely hope
7 this you will enjoy the results. The changes are too numerous to
8 summarize in a few words, jump directly to the end of this message if
11 As usual with major releases, a lot of work that is not directly
12 visible has taken place. The core of LyX has seen more cleanups and
13 some of the new features are the direct results of this work.
15 See the file RELEASE-NOTES for some known problems in that release.
17 In case you are wondering what LyX is, here is what
18 http://www.lyx.org/ has to say on the subject:
20 LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing
21 based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. It
22 is released under a Free Software / Open Source license.
24 LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great,
25 right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting
26 details, 'finger painting' font attributes or futzing around with page
27 boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth's legendary
28 TeX typesetting engine makes you look good.
30 On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output -- or
31 richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced -- looks like
32 nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all
33 looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably
34 different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes 'eating'
35 your dissertation the evening before going to press.
37 LyX is stable and fully featured. It is a multi-platform, fully
38 internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the
39 Macintosh and modern Windows platforms.
41 You can download LyX 1.4.0 here (the .bz2 are compressed with bzip2,
42 which yields smaller files):
44 ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
45 ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.bz2
46 ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
47 ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/lyx-1.4.0.tar.bz2
49 and it should propagate shortly to the following mirrors (which will also host
52 http://lyx.mirror.fr/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
53 ftp://ftp.sdsc.edu/pub/other/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
54 ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
55 ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/publishing/tex/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
56 ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/X11/LyX/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
58 Note that no patch is provided to upgrade from version 1.3.7.
60 Prebuilt binaries (rpms for linux distributions, Mac OS X and Windows
61 installers) should soon be available at
62 ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/bin/1.4.0/
65 If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.4.0, you may either
66 e-mail the LyX developers' mailing list (lyx-devel @ lists.lyx.org), or open
67 a bug report at http://bugzilla.lyx.org
69 If you're having trouble using the new version of LyX, or have a question,
70 first check out http://www.lyx.org/help/. If you can't find the answer there,
71 e-mail the LyX users' list (lyx-users @ lists.lyx.org).
79 What's new in version 1.4.0?
80 ----------------------------
82 ** Improved user interface
84 LyX 1.4 has a re-designed layout for the menus, designed to decrease
85 clutter and maximise productivity. Several menu items (in the Edit
86 menu) are now context-sensitive, so they only appear when needed. For
87 the die-hard old LyX users, the older layout (referred to as the
88 classic UI) is still available, for now.
90 It's now possible to define multiple toolbars as seen in other
91 editors. By default, the new LyX release has two toolbars displayed,
92 the standard one (similar to the static toolbar in LyX 1.3), plus the
93 extra toolbar. In addition, there are two pre-defined toolbars
94 available: one for tables, and one for math.
96 Another new feature worth mentioning is popup toolbars: you can set a
97 toolbar such that it only appears when editing math, or when editing a
102 This new feature, similar to that found in Microsoft Word and others,
103 makes collaboration on a document a cinch. It provides a way to track
104 changes made to a document, and later approve, reject, or modify such
107 ** Much better conversion from .tex to .lyx
109 The ancient and unloved Perl script, reLyX has finally bitten the dust
110 and been replaced by the brand new and shiny tex2lyx. tex2lyx's LaTeX
111 parser follows most of the rules of the real TeX and so is already
112 much more powerful than reLyX ever was.
116 For a system that purports to make it easy to write documents full of
117 logical (as opposed to visual markup), LyX has always had one glaring
118 omission: no character styles. LyX 1.4 goes some way towards
119 addressing this defect, although there's no dialog to define your own
125 The teacher who's setting an exam obviously doesn't want her pupils
126 seeing the answers, yet having questions and answers in the same
127 document will make the life of the markers of that exam much easier.
129 That's just one example of someone who would benefit from LyX's new
130 "branches" feature. In fact, anyone who writes documents which have
131 more than one target audience will find this feature useful.
133 ** Minipages evolve to Boxes
135 In 1.3, LyX only had native support for plain minipages. Now you can
136 use a wide range of box types and decorations directly from the LyX
141 LyX now has three different Notes for you to add to your document from
142 the Insert>Note menu:
144 - the "LyX Note" is not exported to LaTeX, as now. The "Comment" is
145 - exported to LaTeX as a comment environment and is not processed
147 - The Greyed Out note is visible in your PostScript or PDF output as,
148 well, greyed-out text.
150 ** Better language and numbering on screen
152 Two features help to make the screen rendering closer to the printed output:
154 - the labels attached to layouts like Chapter are now translated in
155 the language of the document, which may be different from the
156 language of the menus;
157 - sectioning headers and theorems are now numbered according to the
158 document class specifications.
162 Yes, it's finally there! Tools>Count Words will give you a word
163 count of the document or of the current selection.
167 Nasty "error boxes" were eliminated in favor of a dialog with a list
168 of errors popping up at compilation time.
170 ** Improved bibliography support
172 - LyX's support for natbib has been enhanced. Now, also the mysterious
173 "before citation" field is supported;
174 - We have added support for jurabib, an amazing package to produce
175 flexible citations that are especially well suited for the humanities
177 - Support for sectioned bibliographies (bibtopic) has been added;
178 - the way bibtex is called is now customizable (as is the way the
179 index processor is invoked).
181 ** Improved microtypography support
183 LyX aims to produce superior typography. With 1.4, it supports:
185 - more blank characters (e.g. a "thin space", which should stand here
186 between "e." and "g.");
187 - inner and outer quotation marks without the hassle of toggling the
188 style in the documents dialog. Just use the Alt key.
189 - the handling of figure and table alignment inside floats has been
190 improved. You can now use the paragraph dialog without getting too
191 much space between figure/table and caption.
195 - Figure and table floats can be rotated sideways
197 - The external xfig inset has been improved especially with regard to
200 - The graphics inset dialog has now an "edit" button that allows to
201 edit the included figure
203 - For index generation, xindy can be used instead of makeindex, which
204 has poor support for other than English index sorting.
208 Lots of long-lasting bugs have been fixed, as documented in LyX
209 bugzilla. Probably some new ones have been introduced instead ;-)