* NEWS

[lyx.git] / NEWS

What's new in version 2.0.0?
-------------------------------

The new features in LyX 2.0 are detailed in
http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/NewInLyX20

* Advanced Search Facility
* Spell-checking on the Fly
* Compare Documents Feature
* XHTML Output
* Multilingual Thesaurus
* XeTeX Backend
* Multiple Indices Support
* Progress View and Debugging Pane
* Enhanced Instant Preview
* Forward Search for DVI/PDF Files
* Enhanced Version Control Features


What's new in version 1.6.8?
-----------------------------

LyX 1.6.8 is the result of our ongoing efforts to make our stable version
even more reliable and stable. We have fixed crashes that have been
reported to us, ironed out many small glitches, further polished the user
interface, updated the documentation and added some new layouts.


What's new in version 1.6.7?
-----------------------------

From the list of fixes and improvements, we'd like to highlight
particularly that this release irons out all known stability problems with
Qt 4.6. LyX 1.6.7 is our first release that is supposed to run smoothly
with Qt 4.6, so we urge all distributors who use that version to upgrade
LyX as well.


What's new in version 1.6.6.1?
------------------------------

The sole purpose of this release is to fix one glitch that was introduced
by LyX 1.6.6: The spellchecker missed further misspellings after applying
a correction. This was due to the fix to different bug that had to be
reverted. In any other respect, this release is identical to Lyx 1.6.6.


What's new in version 1.6.6?
-----------------------------

The release features a long list of fixes and improvements. Yet a number
of crashes, reported by our users or our automatic stability testing
program, were fixed. Moreover, LyX was improved in many details. It also
introduces new features, such as support for the enchant spell checking
backend and for aspell language varieties (such as old and new German
spelling in parallel).


What's new in version 1.6.5?
-----------------------------

The release comes with many fixes and improvements. A number of newly
reported crashes were fixed, new layouts and modules were included and
some long-standing requests were implemented (e.g., a working LyX
server on the Windows OS, finally enabling the communication with other
applications such as JabRef on this platform as well).


What's new in version 1.6.4.2?
-------------------------------

The upgrade fixes recurring pseudo-crashes when running LyX on
Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).


What's new in version 1.6.4.1?
-------------------------------

The only change over release 1.6.4 is the fix of a regression on the Mac,
which made some dialogs (such as Preferences and About LyX) unaccessible
via the menu. Other platforms than the Mac were not affected by the issue.


What's new in version 1.6.4?
-------------------------------

This is the fourth maintenance release in the 1.6.x series. This release
covers, amongst many minor improvements, fixes to some rather severe 
issues, such as:

* A workaround to a nasty problem in recent Qt versions (Qt 4.5.0 up to
  4.5.2) that made LyX crash if the document included images that were
  scaled to certain sizes in the work area.
* Fixes to problems that might result in the loss of data.
* Many other stability improvements, thanks to a new debugging script that
  helped to reveal uncovered critical bugs.
* Further fixes to the LaTeX importer (tex2lyx) and the conversion of
  older LyX documents (lyx2lyx).


What's new in version 1.6.3?
-------------------------------

This is the third maintenance release in the 1.6.x series. Besides the usual
improvements of stability, the highlights of this release are:

* tex2lyx is now able to read files in all latex supported encodings and
  transform them into the proper unicode-based format introduced in 1.5.0.
  This paves the way for many other improvements in LaTeX->LyX translation
* The performance problems when editing a master with child documents have
  been resolved.
* LyX 1.6.3 introduces some goodies provided by Qt 4.5 (menu support for 
  fullscreen mode in linux, close button on tabs). Of course these
  improvements (as well as some Qt-related fixes) only show up if LyX is
  compiled against Qt 4.5.


What's new in version 1.6.2?
-------------------------------

This is the second maintenance release in the 1.6.x series. The release
fixes a large number of major and critical bugs that were reported by 
users of LyX 1.6.0 and 1.6.1. Most notably, three bugs that might lead to
dataloss were detected and resolved. Furthermore, a number of crashes,
file conversion and LaTeX output problems are fixed. As a bonus, the 
performance of the application has been improved, and the release also
introduces some new features and user interface improvements.


What's new in version 1.6.1?
-------------------------------

This is the first maintenance release in the brand-new 1.6.x series, and
as such, it mainly focuses on bug fixes. We have ironed out some major
problems that slipped into the application in the wake of the new
features.


What's new in version 1.6.0?
-------------------------------

The new features in LyX 1.6 are detailed in
http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/NewInLyX16

* Multiple Work Areas
* Split Views
* User-formattable Collapsable Insets
* Layout Modules
* Layout combobox changes
* Support for the LaTeX package hyperref
* Support for hyperlinks and URLs
* Improved floats
* New implementation of math macros
* Completion popup
* Inset Tooltip
* Context Menu
* Symbols dialog
* Shortcut Configuration dialog
* Paste Graphics from the Clipboard
* "Visual mode" for bidirectional cursor movement
* Fullscreen mode
* Extended Outliner
* Session management
* Subversion support 
* Graphics parameters groups
* LyX functions manual
* Multi-LFUN Keybindings


What's new in version 1.5.7?
----------------------------

This is the sixth maintenance release in the 1.5.x cycle and it is
expected to be the final release in this series, since a new series of
stable releases has just been introduced by our new major release,
LyX 1.6.0. Besides the obligatory bug fixes, the main feature of this
release is the ability to read files created by LyX 1.6.0 (this feature
requires python 2.3.4 or newer).


What's new in version 1.5.6?
----------------------------

This is the fifth maintenance release in the 1.5.x cycle that has been
started exactly one year ago. The aim of this release was to make LyX
even more robust and to solve some long-standing annoyances. Also,
further translation efforts have been made, and LyX now ships in 23
languages.

What's new in version 1.5.5?
----------------------------

This release further improves the stability and usability of the
application. Besides this, it also introduces some new features.  Most
notably, LyX is now prepared to be compiled with Qt 4.4 that has just
been released: the stability issues that occured in previous versions
of LyX when compiled against Qt 4.4 have been resolved.


What's new in version 1.5.4?
----------------------------

This is a maintenance release. Besides the usual stability
improvements and fixes, this release comes with major improvements in
the handling of Chinese, Korean and Japanese (CJK) languages and
scripts, and introduces some minor new features (such as a character
count option).

While this release continues the stable 1.5.x series, work on the next
major release, 1.6.0, is proceeding. A first alpha version of LyX
1.6.0 will be released later this week for those who like the bleeding
edge experience. Notwithstanding this, expect one or two more 1.5.x
versions to be released, of which the last one will be able to read
the 1.6 format.

All users, especially CJK users, are encouraged to upgrade to this
version.  Caveat: We were forced to switch from the LaTeX package
'floatflt' to 'wrapfig' for wrap figure floats due to a license
problem that limited the availability of the former package. In
general, this should improve your documents containing wrap figures,
however, it is possible that the look and positioning of the floats
changes due to the package change. If you have documents with wrap
floats, please make a backup before upgrading and check the output.


What's new in version 1.5.3?
----------------------------

This is a maintenance release that further improves the stability and
the performance. Besides numerous crashes, the display problems that
slipped into 1.5.2 with the performance fixes (on the Mac and on
Windows) as well as problems entailed to the reworked document classes
were fixed. Furthermore, LyX 1.5.3 comes with speed improvements that
should pay off especially on the Mac and other UNIXes. Finally, this
version also provides some new features.


What's new in version 1.5.2?
----------------------------

This is a maintenance release that focuses on improving the
stability. We have fixed numerous crashes, performance problems, and
other bugs. Furthermore, the documentation has been revised. It covers
all new features of the 1.5.x series now.


What's new in version 1.5.1?
----------------------------

We are pleased to announce the release of LyX 1.5.1. It includes a few
bug fixes and, more importantly, fixes a bug where files produced with
the Document>Compressed option on would be malformed on windows. It
was therefore decided to revert to the trusty 1.4.x code in this area
and release 1.5.1 sooner than anticipated.

All 1.5.0 users are urged to upgrade to 1.5.1.


What's new in version 1.5.0?
----------------------------

As usual with a major release, a lot of work that is not directly
visible has taken place. The core of LyX has seen more cleanups and
some of the new features are the direct results of this work.

* Unicode

LyX 1.5's big goal was to use unicode internally and so resolve a slew
of existing problems with special characters and non-alphabetic
languages. LyX 1.5 is able to output unicode (in addition to
encodings currently available), so that you can use LaTeX's new utf8
encoding or a brand new typesetting system such as XeTeX.
Since the change to unicode touched much of the code base and some
areas still need a cleanup it, is very likely that some bugs related to
the unicode transition still exist. Please have a look at the Known
bugs on the LyX 1.5 page if you encounter a bug that seems to be related
to unicode. If it's not there, then please report it to the lyx-devel
mailing list.

* Integrated CJK support

The very first result of the Unicode transition is that we have finally
merged in the externally maintained CJK-LyX branch.
The languages Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are now supported in
the user interface.
Note that setting the encoding for these languages in LyX 1.5 by
using ERT or the document preamble will lead to LaTeX-errors!
Also note that you may need to run qtconfig and set appropriate default
or substitution fonts to display CJK characters under some circumstances.

* Language support

In addition to the CJK languages, the languages Armenian and Farsi also
have full user interface support.

* Multiple views of the same buffer

LyX can now display multiple views of the same buffer. I.e., you can
now open a single document in multiple windows and work on different
parts of it synchronously.

* Outliner and embedded TOC

LyX has another long-awaited feature: a basic outliner mode, in which
you can move chapters and sections around in the Table of Contents
dialog. (The outliner has been backported and was released with LyX
1.4.4.) The TOC dialog is now a dock widget, embedded in the main window.

* Session management

LyX is now able to remember window size and position and it will
reopen the documents you worked on last time around. If you've
selected the feature in the Preferences dialog, it'll even move the
cursor to the place you were working on last!  Furthermore, toolbars
can (finally!) be switched on/off in View->Toolbars and moved about in
the LyX window. The session management will remember their state.

* Source code Viewer

As a kind of "anti-preview-latex", a dialog was implemented that lets
you view the source code of a given paragraph/selection or the whole
document.

* New Font Selection Interface

LyX's font selection abilities have been one of its weakest and most
outdated components. A completely new interface was implemented that
provides access to the power of LaTeX's font selection scheme.

* Tabular extensions

LyX's table support is certainly less powerful than that of
LaTeX. Support for the booktabs package has been implemented,
providing beautiful and elegant tabulars.

* Nomenclatures

LyX now has native support for the nomencl package. With this,
you can treat your document with all sorts of nomenclatures,
glossaries and fancy notations.

* Tabbed Widget

LyX now uses tabbed widgets to display multiple documents.

* Enhanced Math Toolbars

The math toolbar was enhanced significantly. Drop down menus were
added, allowing the integration of all of the math panel's content
to the math toolbars.
Since this input method is much easier than the clumsy panel, the math
panel itself has been removed and superceded by the toolbars.

* Frontend News

LyX 1.5 uses the Qt4 toolkit. This is especially good news for
Windows users, because there's an official, GPL version of Qt4. They no
longer have to rely on an unofficial port of the Unix Qt3 library to
Windows.  The good old XForms frontend went the way of the dodo. It
was both hated and loved, and certainly shaped the unique look of LyX
in the past. It was finally killed off, however, by the switch to
unicode.  The Qt3 frontend was also removed.  The work on the GTK
frontend has been transferred to a branch because its development has
essentially stalled.

* Change tracking enhancements

Major parts of the change tracking code have been rewritten, addressing
several problems that existed in the previous implementation.

* Converter file cache

A cache for converted files, such as included figures, has been
implemented. This can speed up LyX's performance considerably when
displaying documents with many included figures that need conversion
to a format that can be rendered on screen.  The converter file cache
is enabled by default.

The default maximum age of a cached file is 6 months. You can change
that with the line

 \converter_cache_maxage xxx

where xxx is the maximum age in seconds, in your preferences file.

* Unified Windows installer

The two windows installers are being merged and bug reports regarding
both installers are welcome.

* Program listings

The traditional way to insert program listings in LyX involves the use
of the LyX-Code style. This option works quite well for short snippets but
does not support in-line code segments or the inclusion of external files.

Using the listings latex package as the backend a new inset was added that
supports all these three ways of listing computer programs.

* LaTeX-package support

LyX provides the following new document classes:
 - article(IOP) - for scientific papers published by the IOP group
 - presentation(powerdot) - for presentations using the powerdot package
 - curriculum vitae(Europe) - for CVs following the guidelines of the EU
 - curriculum vitae(modern) - for CVs using the moderncv package
 - curriculum vitae(simple) - for simple CVs

* Minor user interface improvements

Several minor improvements of the user interface have been made, such as:

 - Syntax highlighting of the user preamble and the LaTeX log file.
 - Better parsing of BibTeX databases (in the citation dialog).
 - Support for optional arguments for environments.

* Enhanced clipboard/selection handling

The clipboard has been tuned to work better with other applications.
Parallel to clipboard usages, the *nix way of using middle-button
to paste selected text is enhanced, and is also available under windows
(but within lyx only). Selection of lyx text is now persistent in that
you can paste the selected text using the middle button multiple times,
even after the selection has been cleared.

* Limited support for local class and layout files

Lyx can not create, but can open a .lyx file with .cls and .layout files
stored in the same directory as the .lyx file. That is to say, if you send
your co-author a .lyx file with associated class and layout files, s/he
can view and modify the .lyx file directly, without having to install the
.cls and .layout files, reconfigure and restart lyx. Note that the .cls and
.layout files have to be copied to every directory your .lyx files reside,
should you use different directories for master and child documents.

* Under the hood

As usual, one big task has been the ongoing code cleanup of the LyX
core. Performing this cleanup makes the code more understandable and
easier to maintain. It also leads inevitably to a more robust
application. Nonetheless, it's an unfortunate fact of life that ugly
code is sometimes faster than pretty code. We're well aware that LyX
1.4 is slower than LyX 1.3. One important goal of this 1.5 development
series has been to bring this speed back.

** Bug fixes

Lots of long-lasting bugs have been fixed, as documented in LyX
bugzilla. Probably some new ones have been introduced instead ;-)


What's new in version 1.4.5.1?
------------------------------

The only change over release 1.4.5 is the addition to the distribution
of one file necessary to read and write lyx 1.5 files.


What's new in version 1.4.5?
----------------------------

This is expected to be the last release in the 1.4.x stable
branch. Besides the obligatory bug fixes, its main feature is the
ability to read files created by LyX 1.5.0 (this feature requires
python 2.3.4 or later).


What's new in version 1.4.4?
----------------------------

This is of course a bug fix release, but some new features sneaked in, among which:

*) Outline support: it is now possible to move around parts of
documents in the Table of Contents dialog.

*) Add new UI settings default-autotoolbars and default-alltoolbars
allowing to select what toolbars are active or shown automatically.

*) Improved documentation.

*) Speed improvements, especially on windows.


What's new in version 1.4.3?
----------------------------

This is a bug fix release that improves stability and MS Windows
 support. Notable new features include:

*) The windows port does not need a MSys (unix-like tools)
 installation anymore.

*) A new function inset-dissolve has been added to delete an text
 inset and put its contents in the enclosing text; this can be
 accessed (like in the math editor) by pressing Backspace at the start
 of an inset, or Delete at the end.

*) Many crashes have been fixed, in particular for systems based on
 gcc 4.1.


What's new in version 1.4.2?
----------------------------

This is a bug fix release that improves performance, stability and native OS support. Notable new features include:

*) LyX now automatically uses file viewers and editors set at OS level
 [Windows and Mac OS X only].

*) The windows installer has been completely rewritten.

*) A new function buffer-toggle-compression (and corresponding entry
 in the Document menu) has been added to change whether the file will
 be compressed on disk or not.

*) A "LaTeX (pdflatex)" output format has been added. This new output
 format produces .tex files that are suitable for pdflatex, including
 figure conversion to png, pdf or jpeg instead of eps.


What's new in version 1.4.1?
----------------------------

This is a bug fix release, but some of the bugs were big. In particular:

*) fix the huge memory consumption and corresponding sluggishness with
 documents containing many graphics or `instant preview' snippets.

*) fix slow screen update with nested insets, particularly with
 LyX/Mac.

*) fix the delay when exiting from a math inset.

*) let the change tracking code track paragraph breaks too.

*) Also, this will be the first 1.4 release with a windows
 installer. See the file RELEASE-NOTES for some known problems in this
 release.

What's new in version 1.4.0?
----------------------------

As usual with major releases, a lot of work that is not directly
visible has taken place. The core of LyX has seen more cleanups and
some of the new features are the direct results of this work.

** Improved user interface

LyX 1.4 has a re-designed layout for the menus, designed to decrease
clutter and maximise productivity. Several menu items (in the Edit
menu) are now context-sensitive, so they only appear when needed. For
the die-hard old LyX users, the older layout (referred to as the
classic UI) is still available, for now.

It's now possible to define multiple toolbars as seen in other
editors. By default, the new LyX release has two toolbars displayed,
the standard one (similar to the static toolbar in LyX 1.3), plus the
extra toolbar. In addition, there are two pre-defined toolbars
available: one for tables, and one for math.

Another new feature worth mentioning is popup toolbars: you can set a
toolbar such that it only appears when editing math, or when editing a
table.

** Change tracking

This new feature, similar to that found in Microsoft Word and others,
makes collaboration on a document a cinch. It provides a way to track
changes made to a document, and later approve, reject, or modify such
changes.

** Much better conversion from .tex to .lyx

The ancient and unloved Perl script, reLyX has finally bitten the dust
and been replaced by the brand new and shiny tex2lyx. tex2lyx's LaTeX
parser follows most of the rules of the real TeX and so is already
much more powerful than reLyX ever was.

** Character styles

For a system that purports to make it easy to write documents full of
logical (as opposed to visual markup), LyX has always had one glaring
omission: no character styles. LyX 1.4 goes some way towards
addressing this defect, although there's no dialog to define your own
styles.


** Branches

The teacher who's setting an exam obviously doesn't want her pupils
seeing the answers, yet having questions and answers in the same
document will make the life of the markers of that exam much easier.

That's just one example of someone who would benefit from LyX's new
"branches" feature. In fact, anyone who writes documents which have
more than one target audience will find this feature useful.

** Minipages evolve to Boxes

In 1.3, LyX only had native support for plain minipages. Now you can
use a wide range of box types and decorations directly from the LyX
GUI

** Notes

LyX now has three different Notes for you to add to your document from
the Insert>Note menu:

- the "LyX Note" is not exported to LaTeX, as now. The "Comment" is
- exported to LaTeX as a comment environment and is not processed
  further.
- The Greyed Out note is visible in your PostScript or PDF output as,
  well, greyed-out text.

** Better language and numbering on screen

Two features help to make the screen rendering closer to the printed output:

- the labels attached to layouts like Chapter are now translated in
  the language of the document, which may be different from the
  language of the menus;
- sectioning headers and theorems are now numbered according to the
  document class specifications.

** Word count

Yes, it's finally there! Tools>Count Words will give you a word
count of the document or of the current selection.

** Error Lists

Nasty "error boxes" were eliminated in favor of a dialog with a list
of errors popping up at compilation time.

** Improved bibliography support

- LyX's support for natbib has been enhanced. Now, also the mysterious
  "before citation" field is supported;
- We have added support for jurabib, an amazing package to produce
  flexible citations that are especially well suited for the humanities
  and law fields;
- Support for sectioned bibliographies (bibtopic) has been added;
- the way bibtex is called is now customizable (as is the way the
  index processor is invoked).

** Improved microtypography support

LyX aims to produce superior typography. With 1.4, it supports:

- more blank characters (e.g. a "thin space", which should stand here
  between "e." and "g.");
- inner and outer quotation marks without the hassle of toggling the
  style in the documents dialog. Just use the Alt key.
- the handling of figure and table alignment inside floats has been
  improved. You can now use the paragraph dialog without getting too
  much space between figure/table and caption.

** Small bits

- Figure and table floats can be rotated sideways

- The external xfig inset has been improved especially with regard to
  pdf generation

- The graphics inset dialog has now an "edit" button that allows to
  edit the included figure

- For index generation, xindy can be used instead of makeindex, which
  has poor support for other than English index sorting.

** Bug fixes

Lots of long-lasting bugs have been fixed, as documented in LyX
bugzilla. Probably some new ones have been introduced instead ;-)


What's new in version 1.3.7?
----------------------------

We hope that this will be the last release in the 1.3.x series. In
addition to many bug fixes, the following improvements are worth
noting:

- LyX 1.3.7 is able to read all LyX files up to file format 245,
  the format that we anticipate will be used by the forthcoming LyX 1.4.0.

- The windows version has received some polish, in particular in the
  installer and in the handling of file names.

All current 1.3.x users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.


What's new in version 1.3.6?
----------------------------

Unix and MacOSX users should consider this to be a bugfix release.

To Windows users, however, LyX 1.3.6 is the first version of LyX
to support the platform officially. This means that we've put a huge
effort into squashing those bugs that were present in Ruurd Reitsma's
unofficial ports to Windows. Large chunks of the code base have been
touched in an attempt to resolve these problems so whilst we're
confident that LyX/Win 1.3.6 will be the best ever version of LyX on
Windows, we cannot say that it's bug free.

We would like to highlight three fixes in particular:
  * It is now possible to typeset files which reside in a directory with
    spaces in its name; this requires a modern TeX implementation (such
    as teTeX 3.0).
  * It is possible to use Ctrl-PageDown and Control-PageUp (<opt>-tab
    and <opt><shift>-tab with LyX/Mac) to switch between the open documents.
  * LaTeX-type accents, ligature breaks and hyphenation marks are now
    considered as part of words



What's new in version 1.3.5?
----------------------------

This is mainly a bugfix release, with few notable user-visible
improvements. However, we would like to highlight two fixes in particular:
  * Nested documents (with Insert>Include File...), which have been
    broken since LyX 1.2.0, should now work properly, including the
    case where the files are in different directories.
  * It is now possible to compile LyX with gcc 3.4.

What's new in version 1.3.4?
----------------------------

This is a maintenance release which improves upon 1.3.3 in
five main areas:
  * It adds support for old files from LyX 0.10.x or 0.12.x;
  * Lyx documents can now be opened and edited even if
    they use text classes not present in your latex installation;
  * New Qt features have been added (improved selection,
    drag-and-drop);
  * Mac OS X support is much improved;
  * The interface and documentation localization have
    been polished.

What's new in version 1.3.3?
----------------------------

This is a maintenance release which improves upon 1.3.2 in
four main areas:
  * import of old LyX files and export to DocBook have been improved;
  * many small bugs in the Qt frontend have been fixed;
  * MacOSX users can now compile LyX and enjoy the native MacOSX interface;
  * several languages now benefit from an improved translation of
    the user interface and documentation.

What's new in version 1.3.2?
----------------------------

This is a maintenance release which improves upon 1.3.1 in
three main areas:
  * the spellchecker code has been overhauled and many bugs
    have been squashed;
  * many small bugs in the Qt frontend have been fixed;
  * several languages now benefit from an improved translation of
    the user interface.

What's new in version 1.3.1?
----------------------------

LyX 1.3.1 is a maintenance release, which adds some polish to the new
features of LyX 1.3.0 (especially the Qt frontend) and also fixes some
significant bugs in the math editor and the lyx2lyx import script. We
also threw in a few new features (new textclasses, latex import
improvements) for good measure.

** Updates

- when there is vertical space between paragraphs, the amount of space
  is also indicated in the small/medium/large case [bug #814]

- reLyX improvements: support for natib citations, for 'm' column
  descriptors in tables; a .lyx file generated by reLyX now says this

- new classes mwart, mwbk and mwrep (adaptation of the base classes to
  polish conventions); new class elsart (for journals published by
  Elsevier); updated classes koma-script (in particular new class
  scrlttr2); re-introduce class ijmpd (which was in 1.2.x) and unbreak
  class kluwer

- new "polski" keymap, useful for entering Polish on a QWERTY
  keyboard; update to Scientific Word-compatible bindings
  (documentation has been updated too)

- updates to the danish, dutch, french, german, norwegian, polish and
  spanish translation of menus

- Most of the documentation has been updated for the current version
  of LyX. If you find some problems with the documentation in this
  release, please contact lyx-docs@lists.lyx.org

What's new in version 1.3.0?
----------------------------

As with the previous major version 1.2.0, many things make this new
release an exciting one. One of the major projects that has been going
on behind the scenes is the so-called GUI-independence project. We are
glad to announce that version 1.3.0 shows the first results of this.
LyX now comes in two flavours: Qt-LyX and xforms-LyX!

Although this is the most visible change in version 1.3, this should not
hide the fact that the `under the hood' changes to the code have again
been very important. A detailed list can be found below.

** Qt frontend

This is of course the most visible new feature. This frontend supports
either Qt 2.x or 3.x and is mostly feature complete. Note that some
of the dialogs are slightly different in design, but are generally
functionally equivalent.

Note that if Qt is using Xft2/fontconfig, you may need to install the
latex-xft-fonts package at ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/contrib to get maths
symbols displayed properly.

** Gnome frontend

Unfortunately, the development of the Gnome frontend has mostly
stopped recently and we have therefore chosen to disable it. We
strongly invite anyone willing to revive this port to volunteer on the
developer's list.

** Instant preview

preview-latex is an emacs package for LaTeX that allows "instant previews"
of LaTeX code, so you can immediately see the visual rendering of the
LaTeX in the document. Its project home page can be found at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/preview-latex. With the help of David
Kastrup, the author, LyX 1.3.0 can harness this functionality to
allow instant previews in the LyX window of math equations and
figures. This feature can be immensely useful, ensuring that the
rendering of your equation will look right in the final output. The
preview is only displayed (if enabled) when you're not editing the
actual equation, so it's unobtrusive too.

** Math editor

There have been a few visible and some not-so-visible changes. On the
visible side we have better visual feedback regarding the structure of
a formula, showing the nesting by small purple decorations in the
formula itself and revealing the names of the nesting levels in the
minibuffer. There is now native support for symbols from the wasy
package containing e.g. the zodiac symbols. New also is the internal
structure of font changes which are now proper "insets", just like
anything else from a square root to an array. This not only simplifies
the code greatly but also allows the same editing tricks as for the
"regular" math. However, it was not possible to tweak the visible
behaviour to mimic 1.2 in all cases, so this might take some time to
get accustomed to. On the pro side, the new structure allowed
support for LaTeX's \mbox and \fbox to be implemented and general
"switching back to text mode within math", so a lot of "evil red text"
trickery is not needed anymore. The most visible changes are the following:

- Pressing { and } will insert LaTeX's \{ and \} which show up as { }
  in the printout. To get LaTeX's {} nesting, you need to type \{.

- Fonts changes now really nest. Repeated application of a font change
  will result in nested font changes!  To remove a font change without
  removing the "contents", it is now possible to "pull the argument"
  like in other insets, i.e. put the cursor in the first position of
  the inset and press 'backspace'.

** Reading old files

LyX now has a new script lyx2lyx which enables the reading of any file
produced by LyX versions as old as 0.12. Work is in progress on files
created with LyX 0.10 (LyX 1.4 time-line) and still older files are
in the forge. Basically if lyx wrote it LyX will read it. :-)

There is also a strong demand to be able to read files produced by
_newer_ versions of LyX. While lyx2lyx has the infrastructure in place
to do such things, the filters to `downgrade' LyX files (from 1.3.0 to
1.2.x, for example) have not yet been written.

** Miscellaneous changes

- LyX now automatically uses TeX fonts for screen rendering of math
  equations if they are available (it is not necessary anymore to
  configure your font server).

- The Insert>Short Title allows the addition of an optional text
  for section headings and captions that is designed to be used in
  tables of contents.

- The Insert>Float>Floatflt Figure menu item restores the ability
  to wrap text around an image which was present in 1.1.6 and
  removed in 1.2.0

- If you configure with --with-pspell (which uses the PSpell library for
  spellchecking), you will be able to automatically spell-check
  multi-language documents, assuming you have the right dictionaries
  installed.


What's new in version 1.2.3?
----------------------------

LyX 1.2.3 is a maintenance release. It mainly fixes a very bad bug
where configuring LyX as root could lead to deleting the /dev/null
special device (this does not impact users of prebuilt binaries).
Also, a bug where LyX would create zombie processes has been fixed.

** Updates

- updated italian User Guide

- updated french localization


What's new in version 1.2.2?
----------------------------

LyX 1.2.2 is a maintenance release. It is a recommended upgrade from
1.2.0 or 1.2.1, especially since it fixes a few bugs introduced in
1.2.1.

** Updates

- LyX builds with the newly released xforms 1.0. Actually, it is
  advised to use this version of xforms, since it fixes many bugs and
  support for older versions will probably be dropped in LyX 1.3.0

- selecting a word by double clicking now sets the X clipboard (like
  when dragging the mouse)

- it is now possible to specify the arguments for viewers; in
  particular, this means that it is possible to use browsers which
  require a file: URL as HTML viewers (mozilla is used as default if
  found)

- when a new LyX version is launched, the Edit>Reconfigure tool is
  automatically invoked; this should avoid many problems with users
  who are not aware that it is needed

- when changing the current layout with the toolbar, the corresponding
  keyboard binding is shown in the minibuffer

- in hebrew language, the key " now inserts a typewriter quote (since
  other quotes do not make sense in hebrew)

- Insert>Lists & TOC>Bibtex Reference uses style 'plain' by default

- new class ijmpd; update cl2emult, llncs and foils textclasses

- update sciword bindings

- small cleanup of UserGuide and FAQ; update to German, French and
  Russian documentation; new Hebrew tutorial

- update french, german, russian, finnish and danish localization of
  the interface


What's new in version 1.2.1?
----------------------------

LyX 1.2.1 is a maintenance release which fixes many bugs in version
1.2.0. We hope in this way to enhance world happiness, allowing the
developers to continue busily to prepare the next major release
1.3.0. There are a lot of fixes in there, and upgrading is highly
recommended.

** Updates

- it is now possible to build LyX with xforms 1.0rc4 (and probably 1.0
  when this gets released)

- partial rewrite of the find & replace feature. This should solve most of
  the performance problems

- new option `keep aspect ratio' in graphics dialog

- revert to the old behaviour when creating new floats (figure,
  table...): the empty paragraph in the float now is a caption. It
  seems that 1.2.0 behaviour was confusing too many people

- it is now possible to set the float placement parameters to
  "document defaults"

- when the cursor is inside a collapsible inset, `Edit>Open/close
  float' will leave it after the inset after closing it (this should
  help entering of ERT insets)

- update Finnish, Danish, French and Russian localizations

- update Tutorial to 1.2.x features

- better support for entering Cyrillic and Greek alphabets

- cleanup shortcuts for section layouts. Starred versions are now
  obtained by prepending a * to the section number (M-p asterisk 0, ...,
  M-p asterisk 6)

- add keyboard shortcuts to the Documents menu

- support the numpad direction keys as equivalent to normal cursor
  keys

- it is now possible to specify a non-existent file name on the command
  line and have this file created for you

- new class cl2emult; update template for IEEEtran; small update to
  heb-article and hollywood textclasses


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
really begin to 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).

This version sees the introduction of the so-called `new' insets,
which can contain arbitrary text. As a consequence, many new features
are now possible:

- Floats, footnotes and margin notes are now real insets. The
  positional parameters of figure, table and algorithm floats can be set
  float-by-float

- Most problems with the new table inset of 1.1.6 have been addressed
  (memory consumption, file bloat, spell-checking, search and replace...).
  Better longtable header/footer support was implemented.

- TeX mode has been superseded by the ERT inset, which is foldable, or
  can be shown inline

- Notes inset can now contain arbitrary LyX constructs; they will not
  appear in the output.

- New minipage inset

Note that another consequence of these changes is that older LyX
versions will almost certainly fail to read files produced by LyX
1.2.0.


Other more traditional insets have been improved too:

- New graphics inset with support for hassle-free inclusion of various
  image formats (GIF, JPEG, PNG and EPS by default) and a new
  rendering scheme that should fix the bugs we had with the older
  ghostscript method.

- Support for natbib for bibliography citations



The math editor has been mostly rewritten. This begun as a general
cleanup, but it turns out that many new features happened in this
process, among which:

- many of the known bugs or annoyances in mathed have been fixed.

- possibility to display all standard latex and amsmath symbols (and
  also the \mathcal, \mathbb, and \mathfrak fonts)as long as the
  relevant fonts have been made available to the X server

- support for many amsmath features
  Commands: xrightarrow, xleftarrow, substack, underset, dddot
  over/under arrows (e.g. underleftarrow).
  Environments: align, alignat, xalignat, xxalignat, multline, gather
  split, gathered, aligned, cases, subarray, pmatrix, bmatrix, vmatrix,
  Vmatrix

- Preliminary support for xymatrix

- Support for horizontal and vertical lines in arrays.

- Improvements to the parser

- Improvements to math text mode

- (Better) support for nested macros

- Enable size changes to arrays after creation (add/delete rows/columns)

- Support for changing font or displaystyle on a selection

- GUI support provided for many more features


Other changes include:

- Support for windows with cygwin has been incorporated into the main
  distribution.

- Most of the dialogs have been rewritten in the GUI-I framework, and
  improved in the process

- 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 and alternative frontends are expected for 1.3.0

- The citation dialog has a search facility, with support for regular
  expressions.

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

- Support for parsing preamble when converting LaTeX files. Along
  with changes in the LaTeX production of alignment options, this
  improves round-trip work where you export a LyX document as
  LaTeX, and later reimport it from LaTeX.

- Updated documentation

- a few more document classes for journals: dtk, ltugboat, spie and
  svprobth.

- Support for setting bookmarks and jumping to them

- It is possible to cycle between a label and its references.

- Preliminary support for multiple bibliographies

- Babel can be disabled

- A thesaurus facility (English only)

What's new in LyX version 1.1.6fix4?
------------------------------------

LyX 1.1.6fix4 is a bugfix release.

New features:

- add support for latin3, latin4 and latin9 encodings

- change the encoding for estonian from latin4 to latin1, since it
  appears to be more suitable.

- add support for ae fonts (emulation of T1 encoding with OT1 fonts).
  This is useful for creating pdf files in T1 encoding

- add support for dvipdfm

- when passing a file name as argument from command line, the
  extension `.lyx' is added if necessary

- insert error insets in the documents when there have been unknown
  tokens in the file

- new class `kluwer'; update to hollywood class

- the class encts has been renamed to entcs (stupid typo!) and
  slightly updated

- updates to the introduction document and the italian user guide

- updates to the russian, finnish and hebrew localisations


What's new in LyX version 1.1.6fix3?
------------------------------------

LyX 1.1.6fix3 is a bugfix release.

New features:

- documentation has been updated to remove errors due to interface
  change

- new italian user guide; updated french localisation of menus and
  documentation; new dutch translations of some examples

- the `history' and `revert' functionalities have been implemented in CVS
  support

- it is now possible to enter directly characters in an encoding
  different from latin1 (providing one is using a correct screen font)

- new encts class for Elsevier Science's Electronic Notes in
  Theoretical Computer Science

- new cv class for writing curriculum vitae

- new extarticle, extreport, extbook and extletter classes, which are
  versions of the normal classes with more font sizes available

- the aapaper class has been complemented with a aa class for the A&A
  LaTeX document class version 5.0, which is slightly incompatible
  with the older version


What's new in LyX version 1.1.6fix2?
------------------------------------

LyX 1.1.6fix2 is a bugfix release.

New features:

- add language support in docbook; better support for verbatim text.

- the --with-lyx-suffix flag introduced in 1.1.6fix1 has been renamed
  to --with-version-suffix; it can now be used without argument (to
  install as lyx-1.1.6fix2)

- many translations updated; big french documentation overhaul; german
  documentation update.

- preliminary Thai support; new serbo-croatian support


What's new in LyX version 1.1.6fix1?
------------------------------------

LyX 1.1.6fix1 is a bugfix release.

New features:

- updated documentation for version 1.1.6; new french documentation
  translations; updated danish translation of the interface.

- better support for ukrainian language

- non working --with-lyxname configure option has been replaced by
  working --with-lyx-suffix.

- in default cua bindings, change C-k from font-noun to
  line-delete-forward.

- Add the prefix "key-" to the default keys for bibliography insets.

- Show both key and label of a bibliography inset.


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.