[Sorry about the delay, it seems that this message was not sent to the announce list at the time of the release -- JMarc]
Public release of LyX version 1.3.0 =================================== We are glad to announce the release of LyX 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. 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 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. You can download LyX 1.3.0 here : 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 and it should shortly propagate to the following mirrors : 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 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 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), 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 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) if you can't find an answer there. 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.
