lyx_mirror/ANNOUNCE

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.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 ;-)