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