1 Public release of LyX version 1.3.0
2 ===================================
4 We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.3.0.
6 As with the previous major version 1.2.0, many things make this new
7 release an exciting one. One of the major projects that has been going
8 on behind the scenes is the so-called GUI-independence project. We are
9 glad to announce that version 1.3.0 shows the first results of this.
10 LyX now comes in two flavours: Qt-LyX and xforms-LyX!
12 Although this is the most visible change in version 1.3, this should not
13 hide the fact that the `under the hood' changes to the code have again
14 been very important. A detailed list can be found below.
16 In case you are wondering what LyX is, here is what
17 http://www.lyx.org/ has to say on the subject:
19 LyX is an advanced open source document processor that encourages an
20 approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their
21 appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of
22 visual layout to the software.
24 LyX runs on many Unix platforms (including MacOS X), OS/2, and under
25 Windows/Cygwin. Note that all these ports use the same xforms interface
26 and therefore need an X server.
28 You can download LyX 1.3.0 here :
30 ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
31 ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
33 and it should shortly propagate to the following mirrors :
35 ftp://ftp.sdsc.edu/pub/other/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
36 ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
37 ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/publishing/tex/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
38 ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/X11/LyX/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
39 ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/vol/rzm0/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
42 Prebuild binaries (mainly rpms for linux distributions) should soon be
44 ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/bin/1.3.0
46 If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.3.0, you may either
47 e-mail the LyX user's mailing list (lyx-users@lists.lyx.org), or open
48 a bug report at http://bugzilla.lyx.org
50 If you're having trouble using the new version of LyX, or have a question,
51 first check out http://www.lyx.org/help/, and e-mail the LyX user's list if you
52 can't find an answer there.
64 This is of course the most visible new feature. This frontend supports
65 either Qt 2.x or 3.x and is mostly feature complete. Note that some
66 of the dialogs are slightly different in design, but are generally
67 functionally equivalent.
69 Note that if Qt is using Xft2/fontconfig, you may need to install the
70 latex-ttf-fonts package on ftp://ftp.lyx.org/ to get maths symbols
75 The advent of the Qt frontend does not mean that the historical xforms
76 frontend is dead. Actually, it is still the one which is the best
77 implemented, because we have had more time to polish it. In this release,
78 most of the dialogs have been redesigned to be tighter.
80 Note also that the xforms library has been very recently updated to
81 version 1.0. This version has been released under the LGPL (Lesser
82 General Public License), and the availability of the source means that
83 many bugs that have been plaguing LyX have been fixed in xforms. You
84 are advised to upgrade to xforms 1.0 to enjoy all these new fixes.
85 In fact, LyX 1.3.0 no longer supports versions of xforms older than 0.89.5.
87 In most cases the dialogs have been designed to make it impossible to input
88 invalid parameters. The exception to this rule is the input of length data.
89 Power LaTeX users can still input obtuse "glue lengths", but the widgets are
90 highlighted in red if this input is invalid or incomplete. This visual
91 feedback makes it easy to see why LyX won't allow you to Apply your changes.
95 Unfortunately, the development of the Gnome frontend has mostly
96 stopped recently and we have therefore chosen to disable it. We
97 strongly invite anyone willing to revive this port to volunteer on the
102 preview-latex is an emacs package for LaTeX that allows "instant previews"
103 of LaTeX code, so you can immediately see the visual rendering of the
104 LaTeX in the document. Its project home page can be found at
105 http://sourceforge.net/projects/preview-latex. With the help of David
106 Kastrup, the author, LyX 1.3.0 can harness this functionality to
107 allow instant previews in the LyX window of math equations and
108 figures. This feature can be immensely useful, ensuring that the
109 rendering of your equation will look right in the final output. The
110 preview is only displayed (if enabled) when you're not editing the
111 actual equation, so it's unobtrusive too.
115 There have been a few visible and some not-so-visible changes. On the
116 visible side we have better visual feedback regarding the structure of
117 a formula, showing the nesting by small purple decorations in the
118 formula itself and revealing the names of the nesting levels in the
119 minibuffer. There is now native support for symbols from the wasy
120 package containing e.g. the zodiac symbols. New also is the internal
121 structure of font changes which are now proper "insets", just like
122 anything else from a square root to an array. This not only simplifies
123 the code greatly but also allows the same editing tricks as for the
124 "regular" math. However, it was not possible to tweak the visible
125 behaviour to mimic 1.2 in all cases, so this might take some time to
126 get accustomed to. On the pro side, the new structure allowed
127 support for LaTeX's \mbox and \fbox to be implemented and general
128 "switching back to text mode within math", so a lot of "evil red text"
129 trickery is not needed anymore. The most visible changes are the following:
131 - Pressing { and } will insert LaTeX's \{ and \} which show up as { }
132 in the printout. To get LaTeX's {} nesting, you need to type \{.
134 - Fonts changes now really nest. Repeated application of a font change
135 will result in nested font changes! To remove a font change without
136 removing the "contents", it is now possible to "pull the argument"
137 like in other insets, i.e. put the cursor in the first position of
138 the inset and press 'backspace'.
142 LyX now has a new script lyx2lyx which enables the reading of any file
143 produced by LyX versions as old as 0.12. Work is in progress on files
144 created with LyX 0.10 (LyX 1.4 time-line) and still older files are
145 in the forge. Basically if lyx wrote it LyX will read it. :-)
147 There is also a strong demand to be able to read files produced by
148 _newer_ versions of LyX. While lyx2lyx has the infrastructure in place
149 to do such things, the filters to `downgrade' LyX files (from 1.3.0 to
150 1.2.x, for example) have not yet been written.
152 ** Miscellaneous changes
154 - LyX now automatically uses TeX fonts for screen rendering of math
155 equations if they are available (it is not necessary anymore to
156 configure your font server).
158 - The Insert>Short Title allows the addition of an optional text
159 for section headings and captions that is designed to be used in
162 - The Insert>Float>Floatflt Figure menu item restores the ability
163 to wrap text around an image which was present in 1.1.6 and
166 - If you configure with --with-pspell (which uses the PSpell library for
167 spellchecking), you will be able to automatically spell-check
168 multi-language documents, assuming you have the right dictionaries