begin to update NEWS for 1.2.0

[lyx.git] / NEWS

What's new in version 1.2.0?
----------------------------

LyX 1.2.0 is the version where many of changes in the 1.1.x series
begin to really pay off. It should prove to be a very solid base for
further developments. As of this version, we use (yet another) new
versioning scheme: next major version will be 1.3.0, and 1.2.x will
be just incremental fixes (like the fix series used to be for 1.1.5
and 1.1.6). 

Switch to the so-called 'new' insets:

- floats, footnotes and margin notes are now real insets

- most problems with the new table inset of 1.1.6 have been resolved
  (memory consumption, spell-checking, search and replace...)

- TeX mode has been superseded by the 666 (aka ERT) inset, which is
  foldable

- new graphics inset superseding the older figure inset [will that be
  OK in 1.2.0?]

- new minipage inset

- notes inset can now contain arbitrary LyX constructs

- new ligature break special character, useful for words like
  shelfful, or many german words

The math editor has been mostly rewritten, meaning more stability and
the following new features:

  [Andre, can you help here?]

Most of the popups have been rewritten in the GUI-I framework:

- [...]

- the kde frontend has been dropped in favor of a new qt2 frontend.
  Note that only the xforms front is really operational as of this
  version. 

Other changes include:

- support for natbib for bibliography citations

- support for parsing preamble when converting LaTeX files

- updated documentation



What's new in LyX version 1.1.6?
--------------------------------

As with all of the 1.1.x versions of LyX, this release contains a lot
of new code: in particular, more than half of the changes described in
the ChangeLog (which dates back to the 1.1.0 release) concern LyX 1.1.6!

Besides the usual under-the-hood changes, LyX 1.1.6 has many
new user-visible features. The main visible feature is that the
GUI-independent branch of development has been merged, as well as code
from the older development version:

- many popups have been rewritten to use the new GUI-I scheme. In the
  process they have received a nice cleanup: the Document and Paragraph
  popups now contain in one single place what was previously scattered
  in many places. Similarly, the citation and cross reference popups
  have been overhauled.

- LyX now has a Preference popup where you can change most of your
  lyxrc settings.

- the menus can now be defined in a text file, and they automatically
  display the keyboard bindings associated with commands.

- it is now possible to provide your own icons for the toolbar.

- last but not least, work has begun on a KDE and a Gnome frontend for
  LyX. They are not officially supported for this version, but this
  will give you an idea of what is happening.

Other major changes in 1.1.6 include:

- the table support has been completely rewritten. It is now a modular
  object (inset), each cell of which owns a (also) newly written text
  inset. This now permits automatic text-wrap inside a tabular
  cell (if you define a width), multiparagraph mode AND setting of
  layouts for the paragraphs (lists inside a tabular cell!). Last but
  not least, a wide tabular now scrolls automatically so that all of it
  is visible without the need to enlarge the window!

  While there are as yet no other new features, they will be now MUCH
  easier to add. It may be that because of being "young" code some
  features may not work right now, but at least it is much
  better than before.

- new external material inset: this is a new kind of very powerful
  inset which will allow LyX to interface intelligently with external
  applications. Among other good things, it will finally allow you to 
  include GIF, JPEG, TIF, PNG, or just about any other raster format
  images in your document. It will even do an approximate ascii
  rendering when you do Ascii export if you have gifscii installed.

- The code which converts from LyX format to anything else (for
  viewing or exporting purposes) and from anything else to LyX has been
  rewritten. In particular, it is now possible to export to PDF, and to
  import from HTML/MSWord. In fact it's now possible to add new import/export
  formats without recompiling LyX by specifying external programs or scripts
  in lyxrc settings 
  (note that the old import/export lyxrc settings no longer work).

- LyX can do command line exports without opening any GUI components.

- The multilingual support has been improved. It is now possible to use in a
  document languages with different encodings, e.g. German (iso8859-1) and
  Czech (iso8859-2). Such a document can be viewed on screen using an
  iso10646-1 (Unicode) font. However, it is (currently) not possible to
  have differently encoded languages in the same paragraph.
  The languages and the encodings are defined in text files.

- Improved support for Hebrew and Arabic (also present in 1.1.5fix2).

- included files work now with docbook and linuxdoc; new layout
  docbook-book.

- PSpell library and Aspell spell checker support now included thanks
  largely to Kevin Atkinson (PSpell and Aspell maintainer). 

And finally, there have been a lot of smaller changes, which are
mentioned here for your information

- the menu entry File->New does not prompt for a file name by default
  (this can be changed in preferences).

- new -geometry command line option, which replaces the old -width,
  -height, etc.



What's new in LyX version 1.1.5?
--------------------------------

Lots of internal code rewritten, fixed, changed and added. 
We are using the C++ Standard Library more each day.
This will in most cases make the code clearer and easier to maintain
and expand.
We are also gearing up for the merge of the gui-indep branch, expect
this (but not the new gui's) in 1.1.6.

User-visible changes:

- Paste to other programs (like emacs or xterm). Note: text only.

- New TOC menu item for fast access to the table of contents.

- New Refs menu item for quick insertion of cross-references.

- multilingual documents (preliminary support)

- Right-to-Left support for Hebrew and Arabic, this is a first attempt
  only and is likely to improve in future versions.

- Per-paragraph spacing, currently only settable from the
  command-line/window:
      paragraph-spacing (default,single,onehalf,double,other) [float]

- New visual feedback for environment depth of paragraphs (also the !
  in the margin for margin notes has been removed). 

- End-of-proof box, for layouts where it makes sense.

- labels are now editable (not in equations, though).

- Much faster spellchecking (50x faster!).

- The parsing of the LaTex log has improved flagging more errors that
  earlier versions of LyX did not see at all. So if you suddenly have
  errors in documents that used to have none, this might be the casue.
  (And you probably had the error always.)

- Better definition for LyXList style.

- hollywood.layout and broadway.layout have improved. New classes
  LLNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), svjog (Journal of Geodesy)

- support for varioref and pretty ref (preliminary support)

- A couple of changes to the LyX format, so that files written with
  1.1.5 will not be parsed correctly by older LyX versions if protected
  spaces or the new per-paragraph spacing are used. Also the RtL
  support is of course not supported in older versions.

- Removed support for XForms older than 0.88.

- Some command-line options and X resources are not supported anymore
  (The color ones, and -mono -fastselection, -reverse)

- New command-line options '-userdir' which so that you can choose to
  use another dir than .lyx for user configurations. (Or have many.)

- new lyxrc variables: \show_banner [true|false] to remove the banner
  screen, \backupdir_path to tell where the backup files created
  by lyx should be stored, and \override_x_deadkeys to tell whether 
  lyx should provide its own accent keys handling (default is true). 


What's new in LyX version 1.1.4?
--------------------------------

More internals have been rethought. In particular, most of the file IO
routines of LyX have been rewritten to use real C++ streams. Many
changes have also been done to help compile LyX with Sun CC 5.0 and
SGI STL 3.2. 

In the user-visible department, we find:

- new command line option -x (or --execute) and -e (or --export). Now
  direct conversion from .lyx to .tex (.dvi, .ps, ...) is possible
  ('lyx file.lyx --export latex') Unfortunately, X is still needed and
  the GUI pops up during the process...

- better placement of accents for characters that LyX draws by itself;

- improved translations, in particular in Finnish (overhauled UI
  translation), Dutch (tutorial and examples), German

- new configure flag --with-lyxname which allows to choose the name
  under which lyx is installed. Default is "lyx", of course. It used
  to be possible to do this with --program-suffix, but the later has
  in fact a different meaning for autoconf.

And of course, a lot of old bugs have been replaced by new ones ;)


What's new in LyX version 1.1.3?
--------------------------------

More LyX internals have been cleaned-up in this version, but the usual
small number of user-visible changes have appeared:

- LyX is not able anymore to read some old files using latex inset
  (this should not be a problem as these were already not generated by
  LyX 0.12.0). Use LyX 1.0.4 to read files containing those.

- The first line of a .lyx file does not contain anymore the file
  creator name and the date of creation; this was causing various
  problems. 

- the -dbg command line switch is enhanced. For example, "-dbg lyxrc"
  works now. 

- Slightly better handling of dependency tracking for bibtex files.

- The screen representations of \varepsilon and \epsilon have been
  swapped. Now \epsilon shows as red text, and \varepsilon shows as it
  should. This is of course a controversial change (since many people
  will find that their lyx workscreen is suddenly full of red), but done
  for the sake of correctness.

- The characters \angle and \vee are now correctly displayed in math
  formulas; the glyph for \Upsilon has been changed.

- Characters '~' and '^' are now output using standard LaTeX macros,
  which improves the result with T1 fonts.

- new function "command-sequence" to bind several sequences to a key.

- The textclass g-brief has been updated.

And of course many bugs have been fixed.

What's new in LyX version 1.1.2?
--------------------------------

LyX 1.1.2 is a minor upgrade to 1.1.1, only one new feature has been added:

- the export to html feature has been extended to use other programs.
  Currently, tth, latex2html and hevea are supported. Note that the
  variable \tth_command has been renamed to \html_command in lyxrc.

Moreover, a couple of semi-serious bugs have been fixed:

- a bug that caused a crash in lyxstring::find

- the annoying '-' vs. '_' bug.

Also the cheaders files were missing from the 1.1.1 distribution, that
has also been fixed.

What's new in LyX version 1.1.1?
--------------------------------

LyX 1.1.1 marks an important change in our development scheme. While
it does not have many new features, there have been many internal
changes, many of which have been backported from our old development
branch (which is now extinct). So while on the surface this version is
very similar to version 1.0.4, many things happened under the hood. As
a consequence of this: expect that some new bugs have crept in.

User visible changes in lyx 1.1.1: 

- New export to HTML feature

- All the popups should be more resistant to resize actions.

- normal spaces are automatically made unbreakable if we are in
  a freespacing mode (LyX-Code), but not in latex mode. The rule used
  to be that spaces where changed when in typewriter font.

- the default encoding of a new document is now latin1, since it seems
  to be a reasonable default for many people. Note that you can
  override this default with the "Save layout as default" feature.

What's new in 1.0.4 compared to LyX version 1.0.3?
--------------------------------------------------

LyX 1.0.4 is mainly a bugfix update to 1.0.3, but some
new features has been included:

- DocBook support.

- RevTeX4.

- Better printing with custom pagesizes.

- Several language files updated.

- And several bugfixes to math and table.

What's new in 1.0.3 compared to LyX version 1.0.2?
--------------------------------------------------

LyX 1.0.3 is mainly a bugfix update to 1.0.2.

- improved dependency tracking when running LaTeX (fixes one important
  bug in 1.0.2).

- new italian and walloon localizations of the user interface.

- New slovene and spanish translations of the Tutorial.

What's new in 1.0.2 compared to LyX version 1.0.1?
--------------------------------------------------

LyX 1.0.2 is a minor update to LyX 1.0.1. Besides fixing many bugs
compared to version 1.0.0, it adds the following features:

- Improved reLyX: supports EPS image inclusion and works in windows.

- New french translation of Intro.lyx and Tutorial.lyx; new german
  translation of UserGuide.lyx.

- Better multipart document support.

- LyX is now able to parse your BibTex files and show a list of
  entries. 

- New broadway textclass (for plays).


What's new in 1.0.1 compared to LyX version 1.0.0?
--------------------------------------------------

LyX 1.0.1 is a minor update to LyX 1.0.0. Besides fixing many bugs
compared to version 1.0.0, it adds the following features:

- Support for selecting pages and number of copies in print dialog

- New function 'Replace all' in Find&Replace popup

- Support for optional argument of \sqrt in math editor

- Support for literate programming with the 'noweb' program

- New LaTeX document classe: APA 



What's new in 1.0.0 compared to LyX version 0.12.0?
----------------------------------------------------

LyX 1.0.0 is a stable release. Besides fixing many bugs compared to
version 0.12.0, it adds the following features:

- much improved reLyX script: many bugs have been fixed, new options
  have been added, many constructs are now correctly handled. reLyX is now 
  installed along with LyX and has its own man page. Separate upgrades
  of reLyX will be made available later.  The reLyX script is utilized
  by the File->Import LaTeX command in LyX.

- Much improved LinuxDoc (sgml-tools) support: multiple textclasses,
  footnotes, and generally better output.

- New textclasses scrartcl, scrbook, scrreprt and scrlettr
  implementing the corresponding classes of the koma-script
  package. New textclasses latex8 for some IEEE journals, IEEEtran for
  various IEEE Transactions journals and ejour2 for some Springer Verlag
  Journals.  New textclass hollywood to typeset your own film scripts.

- Better support (keyboard bindings, keyboard mappings, and/or menu
  and error message translations) for several languages.

- Documentation has been partly translated to German, Swedish, and Czech. You
  will get this automatically from the Help menu if you set up the LANG
  environment variable correctly (i.e. to 'de' or 'sv').

- Documentation has been generally improved and expanded.

- Improved table support.

- Support for arbitrary line spacing in documents.

- easier handling of index entries.

- The printer configuration scheme has changed a bit to help people
  whose dvips is not configured correctly. As a consequence, you might
  have to modify your lyxrc a bit. All users are advised to re-run
  Option->Reconfigure to update LyX configuration.


Note that your existing global lyxrc file will not be overwritten by
default since now LyX only installs a file lyxrc.example to use as
template.