Public release of LyX version 1.4.0 =================================== We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.4.0.
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. 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. See the file RELEASE-NOTES for some known problems in that release. In case you are wondering what LyX is, here is what http://www.lyx.org/ has to say on the subject: 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 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. 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. 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. You can download LyX 1.4.0 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 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. 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/ If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.4.0, 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/. If you can't find the answer there, e-mail the LyX users' list (lyx-users @ lists.lyx.org). Enjoy! The LyX team. What's new in version 1.4.0? ---------------------------- ** 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 ;-) -- Lgb
