-Public release of LyX version 1.3.0
+Public release of LyX version 1.5.0 (beta 3)
===================================
-We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.3.0.
+We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.5.0 (beta 3).
-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!
+Compared with the previous beta release we have fixed several bugs
+and added some improvements, namely a new inset to support code listings.
+
+We have enabled the converter file cache by default.
+
+Internally we have renamed files to follow a consistent name pattern,
+this will allow an easier navigation of the source code thus simplifying
+bug fixing.
+
+Compared with the latest stable release, this is the culmination of
+one year of hard work, and we sincerely hope you will enjoy the
+results. The changes are too numerous to summarize in a few words,
+with initial unicode support being the flagship among the new
+features, see the end of this announcement for details.
+
+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.
+
+The file RELEASE-NOTES lists some known issues with this release
+compared to the latest stable release (LyX 1.4.4). An updated list of
+issues might later be found at http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/ReleaseNotes
-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.
In case you are wondering what LyX is, here is what
http://www.lyx.org/ has to say on the subject:
- LyX is an advanced open source document processor that encourages an
- approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their
- appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of
- visual layout to the software.
+ LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing
+ based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. It
+ is released under a Free Software / Open Source license.
- LyX runs on many Unix platforms (including MacOS X), OS/2, and under
- Windows/Cygwin. Note that all these ports use the same xforms interface
- and therefore need an X server.
+ LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great,
+ right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting
+ details, 'finger painting' font attributes or futzing around with page
+ boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth's legendary
+ TeX typesetting engine makes you look good.
-You can download LyX 1.3.0 here :
+ On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output -- or
+ richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced -- looks like
+ nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all
+ looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably
+ different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes 'eating'
+ your dissertation the evening before going to press.
- ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
+ LyX is stable and fully featured. It is a multi-platform, fully
+ internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the
+ Macintosh and modern Windows platforms.
-and it should shortly propagate to the following mirrors :
+You can download LyX 1.5.0beta3 here (the .bz2 are compressed with
+bzip2, which yields smaller files):
- ftp://ftp.sdsc.edu/pub/other/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
- ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/publishing/tex/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/X11/LyX/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/vol/rzm0/lyx/stable/lyx-1.3.0.tar.gz
+ ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-1.5.0beta3.tar.gz
+ ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-1.5.0beta3.tar.bz2
+Note that due to the amount of changes no patch is provided to upgrade
+from version 1.4.4.
-Prebuild binaries (mainly rpms for linux distributions) should soon be
-available at
- ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/bin/1.3.0
-
-If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.3.0, you may either
-e-mail the LyX developers' mailing list (lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org), or open
+Prebuilt binaries (rpms for linux distributions, Mac OS X and Windows
+installers) should soon be available at
+ ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/
+
+
+If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.5.0beta3, you may either
+e-mail the LyX developers' mailing list (lyx-devel @ lists.lyx.org), or open
a bug report at http://bugzilla.lyx.org
If you're having trouble using the new version of LyX, or have a question,
-first check out http://www.lyx.org/help/, and e-mail the LyX users' list
-(lyx-users@lists.lyx.org) if you can't find an answer there.
+first check out http://www.lyx.org/help/. If you can't find the answer there,
+e-mail the LyX users' list (lyx-users @ lists.lyx.org).
Enjoy!
The LyX team.
-New features
-============
-
-** 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.
-
-** Xforms frontend
-
-The advent of the Qt frontend does not mean that the historical xforms
-frontend is dead. Actually, it is still the one which is the best
-implemented, because we have had more time to polish it. In this release,
-most of the dialogs have been redesigned to be tighter.
-
-Note also that the xforms library has been very recently updated to
-version 1.0. This version has been released under the LGPL (Lesser
-General Public License), and the availability of the source means that
-many bugs that have been plaguing LyX have been fixed in xforms. You
-are advised to upgrade to xforms 1.0 to enjoy all these new fixes.
-In fact, LyX 1.3.0 no longer supports versions of xforms older than 0.89.5.
-Moreover, support for xforms older than 1.0 will be removed in the next
-release. You have been warned ;-)
-
-In most cases the dialogs have been designed to make it impossible to input
-invalid parameters. The exception to this rule is the input of length data.
-Power LaTeX users can still input obtuse "glue lengths", but the widgets are
-highlighted in red if this input is invalid or incomplete. This visual
-feedback makes it easy to see why LyX won't allow you to Apply your changes.
-
-** 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 1.5.0 (beta 3)?
+----------------------------
+
+* 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 current available), so that you can use LaTeX's new utf8
+encoding or such brand new typesetting systems 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 in 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 from now on, former encoding settings for these languages
+done via ERT or the document preamble will lead to LaTeX-errors!
+
+* 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 was implemented, which
+provides beautiful and elegant tabulars.
+
+
+* Nomenclatures
+
+Native LyX support for the nomencl package was implemented. 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, that allowed to integrate all of the math panel' content to the
+math toolbars.
+Since this input method is much easier than the clumsy panel, the math
+panel itself has been removed and superseded by the toolbars.
+
+* Frontend News
+
+LyX 1.5 will use the Qt4 toolkit. This is especially good news for
+Windows users, since 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 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 were rewritten addressing
+several problems that existed in the existing implementation.
+
+* Converter file cache
+
+A cache for converted files, such as included figures, was
+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.
+
+* Minor user interface improvements
+
+Apart from the described major changes, several minor improvements of
+the user interface have been made, such as:
+
+ - Syntax highlighting for the user preamble and the LaTeX log file
+ - Better parsing of BibTeX databases (in the citation dialog)
+ - Support optional argument for environments
+
+* Enhanced clipboard/selection handling
+
+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 middle button multiple times,
+even after the selection has been cleared.
+
+
+* 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 ;-)
projects / lyx.git / blobdiff