lyx_mirror/ANNOUNCE

Public release of LyX version 1.5.0 (release candidate 2)
===================================

We are pleased to announce the release of LyX 1.5.0 (release candidate 2).
We expect this to be the last release before 1.5.0. We do not anticipate
any further changes before 1.5.0, although any critical bugs and regressions
in 1.5.0rc2 will, of course, be addressed.

We encourage users to try this release candidate and report
any feedback or problems to lyx-devel at lists.lyx.org.

Since the announcement of release candidate 1, we have mostly fixed bugs
and polished the graphical interface.


LyX 1.5.0 is the culmination of 15 months of hard work since the release
of the LyX 1.4 series. We sincerely hope you will enjoy the result.
The changes are too numerous to summarize in a few words, but initial
unicode support is the flagship among the new features. See the end of
this announcement for further 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 current 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:

   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 1.5.0rc2 here (the .bz2 are compressed with
bzip2, which yields smaller files):

	ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-1.5.0rc2.tar.gz
	ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-1.5.0rc2.tar.bz2

Note that due to the amount of change, 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.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/

As confusing as it is, two sets of installers are available to windows
users:
 * LyX-1.5.0rc2-Installer.exe and LyX-1.5.0rc2-Installer-bundle.exe;
 * LyX-1.5.0rc2-AltInstaller.exe and LyX-1.5.0rc2-AltInstaller-Complete.exe.
The former is our official installer and the latter was previously known
as LyXWinInstaller. Please feel free to try either of them. Feedback
and bug reports on both installers are welcome because they will help
the merge of the two installers, which is expected to happen during the
1.5.x series of LyX development.

If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.5.0rc2, you may either
e-mail the LyX developers' mailing list (lyx-devel at 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 at lists.lyx.org).

Enjoy!

The LyX team.


What's new in version 1.5.0 (release candidate 2)?
----------------------------

* 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 ;-)