-Public release of LyX version 1.4.0
+Public release of LyX version 1.5.0 (beta 3)
===================================
-We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.4.0.
+We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.5.0 (beta 3).
-It is the culmination of 3 years of hard work, and we sincerely hope
-this you will enjoy the results. The changes are too numerous to
-summarize in a few words, jump directly to the end of this message if
-you want to know more.
+Compared with the previous beta release we have fixed several bugs
+and added some improvements, namely a new inset to support code listings.
-As usual with major releases, a lot of work that is not directly
+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.
-See the file RELEASE-NOTES for some known problems in that release.
+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
+
In case you are wondering what LyX is, here is what
http://www.lyx.org/ has to say on the subject:
internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the
Macintosh and modern Windows platforms.
-You can download LyX 1.4.0 here (the .bz2 are compressed with bzip2,
-which yields smaller files):
+You can download LyX 1.5.0beta3 here (the .bz2 are compressed with
+bzip2, which yields smaller files):
- ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.bz2
- ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/lyx-1.4.0.tar.bz2
+ 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
-and it should propagate shortly to the following mirrors (which will also host
-the .bz2 versions):
-
- http://lyx.mirror.fr/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.sdsc.edu/pub/other/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
- ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/publishing/tex/lyx/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/X11/LyX/stable/lyx-1.4.0.tar.gz
-
-Note that no patch is provided to upgrade from version 1.3.7.
+Note that due to the amount of changes no patch is provided to upgrade
+from version 1.4.4.
Prebuilt binaries (rpms for linux distributions, Mac OS X and Windows
installers) should soon be available at
- ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/bin/1.4.0/
+ ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/
-If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.4.0, you may either
+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
The LyX team.
-
-What's new in version 1.4.0?
+What's new in version 1.5.0 (beta 3)?
----------------------------
-** Improved user interface
+* 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.
-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.
+* Integrated CJK support
-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.
+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!
-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.
+* Multiple views of the same buffer
-** Change tracking
+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.
-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.
+* Outliner and embedded TOC
-** Much better conversion from .tex to .lyx
+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.
-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.
+* Session management
-** Character styles
+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.
-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.
+* 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.
-** Branches
+* New Font Selection Interface
-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.
+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
-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.
+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.
+
-** Minipages evolve to Boxes
+* Nomenclatures
-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
+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.
-** Notes
+* Tabbed Widget
-LyX now has three different Notes for you to add to your document from
-the Insert>Note menu:
+LyX now uses tabbed widgets to display multiple documents.
-- 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.
+* Enhanced Math Toolbars
-** Better language and numbering on screen
+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.
-Two features help to make the screen rendering closer to the printed output:
+* Frontend News
-- 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.
+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.
-** Word count
+* Change tracking enhancements
-Yes, it's finally there! Tools>Count Words will give you a word
-count of the document or of the current selection.
+Major parts of the change tracking code were rewritten addressing
+several problems that existed in the existing implementation.
-** Error Lists
+* Converter file cache
-Nasty "error boxes" were eliminated in favor of a dialog with a list
-of errors popping up at compilation time.
+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.
-** Improved bibliography support
+The default maximum age of a cached file is 6 months. You can change
+that with the line
-- 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).
+ \converter_cache_maxage xxx
-** Improved microtypography support
+where xxx is the maximum age in seconds, in your preferences file.
-LyX aims to produce superior typography. With 1.4, it supports:
+* Unified Windows installer
-- 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.
+The two windows installers are being merged and bug reports regarding
+both installers are welcome.
-** Small bits
+* Program listings
-- Figure and table floats can be rotated sideways
+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.
-- The external xfig inset has been improved especially with regard to
- pdf generation
+Using the listings latex package as the backend a new inset was added that
+supports all these three ways of listing computer programs.
-- The graphics inset dialog has now an "edit" button that allows to
- edit the included figure
+* Minor user interface improvements
-- For index generation, xindy can be used instead of makeindex, which
- has poor support for other than English index sorting.
+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