lyx_mirror/NEWS
John Levon dd2c62a3a6 mention Qt vs. Xft2 vs. ttf fonts
git-svn-id: svn://svn.lyx.org/lyx/lyx-devel/trunk@5885 a592a061-630c-0410-9148-cb99ea01b6c8
2002-12-20 03:25:12 +00:00

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What's new in version 1.3.0?
----------------------------
As with the previous major version 1.2.0, many things make this new
release an exciting one. This should not however hide the fact that
the `under the hood' changes to the code have been (again) very
important. One of these invisible changes that have been going on for
a long time is the so-called GUI-independence project. We are glad to
announce that version 1.3.0 shows the first results of this.
** Qt frontend
This is of course the most visible new feature. This frontend supports
either Qt 2.x or 3.0.x and is mostly feature complete. Note that some
of the dialogs are slightly different in design, but are generally
functionally equivalent.
Note that if Qt is using Xft2/fontconfig, you may need to install the
latex-ttf-fonts package on ftp://ftp.lyx.org/ to get maths symbols
displayed properly.
** Xforms frontend
The avent 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, since we had much 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. As
a matter of fact, LyX 1.3.0 does not support anymore versions of
xforms older than 0.89.5.
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. With the help of David
Kastrup, the author, current CVS LyX can harness this functionality to
allow instant previews in the LyX window of math equations and
figures. This feature can be immensely useful for making sure the
rendering of your equation will look right in the final output. The
preview is only displayed (when enabled) when you're not editing the
actual equation, so it's unobtrusive too.
** Math editor
There have been few visible and some not-so-visible changes. On the
visible side we have better visual feedback regarding the structure of
a formula by showing the nesting by small purple decorations in the
formula itself and by 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 is also the internal
structure of font changes which are now proper "insets" as anything
else from a square root to an array. This does not only simplify 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
implementing support for LaTeX's \mbox and \fbox and general
"switching back to text mode within math", so a lot of "evil red text"
trickery is not needed anymore.
** Reading old files
LyX now has a new script lyx2lyx which allows to read any old file
produced by LyX versions as old as 0.12. 0.10 series is in the works
for 0.10 (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 for being able to read files produced by
_newer_ versions of LyX. While lyx2lyx has an 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 if they are
available (it is not necessary anymore to configure your font server).
- The Insert>Short Title allows to add an optional text for section
headings and captions that is designed to be used in table of
contents.
- The Insert>Float>Floatflt Figure menu item restores the capability
of wrapping a 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.
What's new in version 1.2.2?
----------------------------
LyX 1.2.2 is a maintenance release. It is a recommended upgrade from
1.2.0 or 1.2.1, especially since it fixes a few bugs introduced in
1.2.1.
** Updates
- LyX builds with the newly released xforms 1.0. Actually, it is
advised to use this version of xforms, since it fixes many bugs and
support for older versions will probably be dropped in LyX 1.3.0
- selecting a word by double clicking now sets the X clipboard (like
when dragging the mouse)
- it is now possible to specify the arguments for viewers; in
particular, this means that it is possible to use browsers which
require a file: URL as HTML viewers (mozilla is used as default if
found)
- when a new LyX version is launched, the Edit>Reconfigure tool is
automatically invoked; this should avoid many problems with users
who are not aware that it is needed
- when changing the current layout with the toolbar, the corresponding
keyboard binding is shown in the minibuffer
- in hebrew language, the key " now inserts a typewriter quote (since
other quotes do not make sense in hebrew)
- Insert>Lists & TOC>Bibtex Reference uses style 'plain' by default
- new class ijmpd; update cl2emult, llncs and foils textclasses
- update sciword bindings
- small cleanup of UserGuide and FAQ; update to German, French and
Russian documentation; new Hebrew tutorial
- update french, german, russian, finnish and danish localization of
the interface
What's new in version 1.2.1?
----------------------------
LyX 1.2.1 is a maintenance release which fixes many bugs in version
1.2.0. We hope in this way to enhance world happiness, allowing the
developers to continue busily to prepare the next major release
1.3.0. There are a lot of fixes in there, and upgrading is highly
recommended.
** Updates
- it is now possible to build LyX with xforms 1.0rc4 (and probably 1.0
when this gets released)
- partial rewrite of the find & replace feature. This should solve most of
the performance problems
- new option `keep aspect ratio' in graphics dialog
- revert to the old behaviour when creating new floats (figure,
table...): the empty paragraph in the float now is a caption. It
seems that 1.2.0 behaviour was confusing too many people
- it is now possible to set the float placement parameters to
"document defaults"
- when the cursor is inside a collapsible inset, `Edit>Open/close
float' will leave it after the inset after closing it (this should
help entering of ERT insets)
- update Finnish, Danish, French and Russian localizations
- update Tutorial to 1.2.x features
- better support for entering Cyrillic and Greek alphabets
- cleanup shortcuts for section layouts. Starred versions are now
obtained by prepending a * to the section number (M-p asterisk 0, ...,
M-p asterisk 6)
- add keyboard shortcuts to the Documents menu
- support the numpad direction keys as equivalent to normal cursor
keys
- it is now possible to specify a non-existent file name on the command
line and have this file created for you
- new class cl2emult; update template for IEEEtran; small update to
heb-article and hollywood textclasses
What's new in version 1.2.0?
----------------------------
LyX 1.2.0 is the version where many of changes in the 1.1.x series
really begin to pay off. It should prove to be a very solid base for
further developments. As of this version, we use (yet another) new
versioning scheme: next major version will be 1.3.0, and 1.2.x will
be just incremental fixes (like the `fix' series used to be for 1.1.5
and 1.1.6).
This version sees the introduction of the so-called `new' insets,
which can contain arbitrary text. As a consequence, many new features
are now possible:
- Floats, footnotes and margin notes are now real insets. The
positional parameters of figure, table and algorithm floats can be set
float-by-float
- Most problems with the new table inset of 1.1.6 have been addressed
(memory consumption, file bloat, spell-checking, search and replace...).
Better longtable header/footer support was implemented.
- TeX mode has been superseded by the ERT inset, which is foldable, or
can be shown inline
- Notes inset can now contain arbitrary LyX constructs; they will not
appear in the output.
- New minipage inset
Note that another consequence of these changes is that older LyX
versions will almost certainly fail to read files produced by LyX
1.2.0.
Other more traditional insets have been improved too:
- New graphics inset with support for hassle-free inclusion of various
image formats (GIF, JPEG, PNG and EPS by default) and a new
rendering scheme that should fix the bugs we had with the older
ghostscript method.
- Support for natbib for bibliography citations
The math editor has been mostly rewritten. This begun as a general
cleanup, but it turns out that many new features happened in this
process, among which:
- many of the known bugs or annoyances in mathed have been fixed.
- possibility to display all standard latex and amsmath symbols (and
also the \mathcal, \mathbb, and \mathfrak fonts)as long as the
relevant fonts have been made available to the X server
- support for many amsmath features
Commands: xrightarrow, xleftarrow, substack, underset, dddot
over/under arrows (e.g. underleftarrow).
Environments: align, alignat, xalignat, xxalignat, multline, gather
split, gathered, aligned, cases, subarray, pmatrix, bmatrix, vmatrix,
Vmatrix
- Preliminary support for xymatrix
- Support for horizontal and vertical lines in arrays.
- Improvements to the parser
- Improvements to math text mode
- (Better) support for nested macros
- Enable size changes to arrays after creation (add/delete rows/columns)
- Support for changing font or displaystyle on a selection
- GUI support provided for many more features
Other changes include:
- Support for windows with cygwin has been incorporated into the main
distribution.
- Most of the dialogs have been rewritten in the GUI-I framework, and
improved in the process
- The kde frontend has been dropped in favor of a new qt2 frontend.
Note that only the xforms front is really operational as of this
version and alternative frontends are expected for 1.3.0
- The citation dialog has a search facility, with support for regular
expressions.
- New ligature break special character, useful for words like
"shelfful", or many german words
- Support for parsing preamble when converting LaTeX files. Along
with changes in the LaTeX production of alignment options, this
improves round-trip work where you export a LyX document as
LaTeX, and later reimport it from LaTeX.
- Updated documentation
- a few more document classes for journals: dtk, ltugboat, spie and
svprobth.
- Support for setting bookmarks and jumping to them
- It is possible to cycle between a label and its references.
- Preliminary support for multiple bibliographies
- Babel can be disabled
- A thesaurus facility (English only)
What's new in LyX version 1.1.6fix4?
------------------------------------
LyX 1.1.6fix4 is a bugfix release.
New features:
- add support for latin3, latin4 and latin9 encodings
- change the encoding for estonian from latin4 to latin1, since it
appears to be more suitable.
- add support for ae fonts (emulation of T1 encoding with OT1 fonts).
This is useful for creating pdf files in T1 encoding
- add support for dvipdfm
- when passing a file name as argument from command line, the
extension `.lyx' is added if necessary
- insert error insets in the documents when there have been unknown
tokens in the file
- new class `kluwer'; update to hollywood class
- the class encts has been renamed to entcs (stupid typo!) and
slightly updated
- updates to the introduction document and the italian user guide
- updates to the russian, finnish and hebrew localisations
What's new in LyX version 1.1.6fix3?
------------------------------------
LyX 1.1.6fix3 is a bugfix release.
New features:
- documentation has been updated to remove errors due to interface
change
- new italian user guide; updated french localisation of menus and
documentation; new dutch translations of some examples
- the `history' and `revert' functionalities have been implemented in CVS
support
- it is now possible to enter directly characters in an encoding
different from latin1 (providing one is using a correct screen font)
- new encts class for Elsevier Science's Electronic Notes in
Theoretical Computer Science
- new cv class for writing curriculum vitae
- new extarticle, extreport, extbook and extletter classes, which are
versions of the normal classes with more font sizes available
- the aapaper class has been complemented with a aa class for the A&A
LaTeX document class version 5.0, which is slightly incompatible
with the older version
What's new in LyX version 1.1.6fix2?
------------------------------------
LyX 1.1.6fix2 is a bugfix release.
New features:
- add language support in docbook; better support for verbatim text.
- the --with-lyx-suffix flag introduced in 1.1.6fix1 has been renamed
to --with-version-suffix; it can now be used without argument (to
install as lyx-1.1.6fix2)
- many translations updated; big french documentation overhaul; german
documentation update.
- preliminary Thai support; new serbo-croatian support
What's new in LyX version 1.1.6fix1?
------------------------------------
LyX 1.1.6fix1 is a bugfix release.
New features:
- updated documentation for version 1.1.6; new french documentation
translations; updated danish translation of the interface.
- better support for ukrainian language
- non working --with-lyxname configure option has been replaced by
working --with-lyx-suffix.
- in default cua bindings, change C-k from font-noun to
line-delete-forward.
- Add the prefix "key-" to the default keys for bibliography insets.
- Show both key and label of a bibliography inset.
What's new in LyX version 1.1.6?
--------------------------------
As with all of the 1.1.x versions of LyX, this release contains a lot
of new code: in particular, more than half of the changes described in
the ChangeLog (which dates back to the 1.1.0 release) concern LyX 1.1.6!
Besides the usual under-the-hood changes, LyX 1.1.6 has many
new user-visible features. The main visible feature is that the
GUI-independent branch of development has been merged, as well as code
from the older development version:
- many popups have been rewritten to use the new GUI-I scheme. In the
process they have received a nice cleanup: the Document and Paragraph
popups now contain in one single place what was previously scattered
in many places. Similarly, the citation and cross reference popups
have been overhauled.
- LyX now has a Preference popup where you can change most of your
lyxrc settings.
- the menus can now be defined in a text file, and they automatically
display the keyboard bindings associated with commands.
- it is now possible to provide your own icons for the toolbar.
- last but not least, work has begun on a KDE and a Gnome frontend for
LyX. They are not officially supported for this version, but this
will give you an idea of what is happening.
Other major changes in 1.1.6 include:
- the table support has been completely rewritten. It is now a modular
object (inset), each cell of which owns a (also) newly written text
inset. This now permits automatic text-wrap inside a tabular
cell (if you define a width), multiparagraph mode AND setting of
layouts for the paragraphs (lists inside a tabular cell!). Last but
not least, a wide tabular now scrolls automatically so that all of it
is visible without the need to enlarge the window!
While there are as yet no other new features, they will be now MUCH
easier to add. It may be that because of being "young" code some
features may not work right now, but at least it is much
better than before.
- new external material inset: this is a new kind of very powerful
inset which will allow LyX to interface intelligently with external
applications. Among other good things, it will finally allow you to
include GIF, JPEG, TIF, PNG, or just about any other raster format
images in your document. It will even do an approximate ascii
rendering when you do Ascii export if you have gifscii installed.
- The code which converts from LyX format to anything else (for
viewing or exporting purposes) and from anything else to LyX has been
rewritten. In particular, it is now possible to export to PDF, and to
import from HTML/MSWord. In fact it's now possible to add new import/export
formats without recompiling LyX by specifying external programs or scripts
in lyxrc settings
(note that the old import/export lyxrc settings no longer work).
- LyX can do command line exports without opening any GUI components.
- The multilingual support has been improved. It is now possible to use in a
document languages with different encodings, e.g. German (iso8859-1) and
Czech (iso8859-2). Such a document can be viewed on screen using an
iso10646-1 (Unicode) font. However, it is (currently) not possible to
have differently encoded languages in the same paragraph.
The languages and the encodings are defined in text files.
- Improved support for Hebrew and Arabic (also present in 1.1.5fix2).
- included files work now with docbook and linuxdoc; new layout
docbook-book.
- PSpell library and Aspell spell checker support now included thanks
largely to Kevin Atkinson (PSpell and Aspell maintainer).
And finally, there have been a lot of smaller changes, which are
mentioned here for your information
- the menu entry File->New does not prompt for a file name by default
(this can be changed in preferences).
- new -geometry command line option, which replaces the old -width,
-height, etc.
What's new in LyX version 1.1.5?
--------------------------------
Lots of internal code rewritten, fixed, changed and added.
We are using the C++ Standard Library more each day.
This will in most cases make the code clearer and easier to maintain
and expand.
We are also gearing up for the merge of the gui-indep branch, expect
this (but not the new gui's) in 1.1.6.
User-visible changes:
- Paste to other programs (like emacs or xterm). Note: text only.
- New TOC menu item for fast access to the table of contents.
- New Refs menu item for quick insertion of cross-references.
- multilingual documents (preliminary support)
- Right-to-Left support for Hebrew and Arabic, this is a first attempt
only and is likely to improve in future versions.
- Per-paragraph spacing, currently only settable from the
command-line/window:
paragraph-spacing (default,single,onehalf,double,other) [float]
- New visual feedback for environment depth of paragraphs (also the !
in the margin for margin notes has been removed).
- End-of-proof box, for layouts where it makes sense.
- labels are now editable (not in equations, though).
- Much faster spellchecking (50x faster!).
- The parsing of the LaTex log has improved flagging more errors that
earlier versions of LyX did not see at all. So if you suddenly have
errors in documents that used to have none, this might be the casue.
(And you probably had the error always.)
- Better definition for LyXList style.
- hollywood.layout and broadway.layout have improved. New classes
LLNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), svjog (Journal of Geodesy)
- support for varioref and pretty ref (preliminary support)
- A couple of changes to the LyX format, so that files written with
1.1.5 will not be parsed correctly by older LyX versions if protected
spaces or the new per-paragraph spacing are used. Also the RtL
support is of course not supported in older versions.
- Removed support for XForms older than 0.88.
- Some command-line options and X resources are not supported anymore
(The color ones, and -mono -fastselection, -reverse)
- New command-line options '-userdir' which so that you can choose to
use another dir than .lyx for user configurations. (Or have many.)
- new lyxrc variables: \show_banner [true|false] to remove the banner
screen, \backupdir_path to tell where the backup files created
by lyx should be stored, and \override_x_deadkeys to tell whether
lyx should provide its own accent keys handling (default is true).
What's new in LyX version 1.1.4?
--------------------------------
More internals have been rethought. In particular, most of the file IO
routines of LyX have been rewritten to use real C++ streams. Many
changes have also been done to help compile LyX with Sun CC 5.0 and
SGI STL 3.2.
In the user-visible department, we find:
- new command line option -x (or --execute) and -e (or --export). Now
direct conversion from .lyx to .tex (.dvi, .ps, ...) is possible
('lyx file.lyx --export latex') Unfortunately, X is still needed and
the GUI pops up during the process...
- better placement of accents for characters that LyX draws by itself;
- improved translations, in particular in Finnish (overhauled UI
translation), Dutch (tutorial and examples), German
- new configure flag --with-lyxname which allows to choose the name
under which lyx is installed. Default is "lyx", of course. It used
to be possible to do this with --program-suffix, but the later has
in fact a different meaning for autoconf.
And of course, a lot of old bugs have been replaced by new ones ;)
What's new in LyX version 1.1.3?
--------------------------------
More LyX internals have been cleaned-up in this version, but the usual
small number of user-visible changes have appeared:
- LyX is not able anymore to read some old files using latex inset
(this should not be a problem as these were already not generated by
LyX 0.12.0). Use LyX 1.0.4 to read files containing those.
- The first line of a .lyx file does not contain anymore the file
creator name and the date of creation; this was causing various
problems.
- the -dbg command line switch is enhanced. For example, "-dbg lyxrc"
works now.
- Slightly better handling of dependency tracking for bibtex files.
- The screen representations of \varepsilon and \epsilon have been
swapped. Now \epsilon shows as red text, and \varepsilon shows as it
should. This is of course a controversial change (since many people
will find that their lyx workscreen is suddenly full of red), but done
for the sake of correctness.
- The characters \angle and \vee are now correctly displayed in math
formulas; the glyph for \Upsilon has been changed.
- Characters '~' and '^' are now output using standard LaTeX macros,
which improves the result with T1 fonts.
- new function "command-sequence" to bind several sequences to a key.
- The textclass g-brief has been updated.
And of course many bugs have been fixed.
What's new in LyX version 1.1.2?
--------------------------------
LyX 1.1.2 is a minor upgrade to 1.1.1, only one new feature has been added:
- the export to html feature has been extended to use other programs.
Currently, tth, latex2html and hevea are supported. Note that the
variable \tth_command has been renamed to \html_command in lyxrc.
Moreover, a couple of semi-serious bugs have been fixed:
- a bug that caused a crash in lyxstring::find
- the annoying '-' vs. '_' bug.
Also the cheaders files were missing from the 1.1.1 distribution, that
has also been fixed.
What's new in LyX version 1.1.1?
--------------------------------
LyX 1.1.1 marks an important change in our development scheme. While
it does not have many new features, there have been many internal
changes, many of which have been backported from our old development
branch (which is now extinct). So while on the surface this version is
very similar to version 1.0.4, many things happened under the hood. As
a consequence of this: expect that some new bugs have crept in.
User visible changes in lyx 1.1.1:
- New export to HTML feature
- All the popups should be more resistant to resize actions.
- normal spaces are automatically made unbreakable if we are in
a freespacing mode (LyX-Code), but not in latex mode. The rule used
to be that spaces where changed when in typewriter font.
- the default encoding of a new document is now latin1, since it seems
to be a reasonable default for many people. Note that you can
override this default with the "Save layout as default" feature.
What's new in 1.0.4 compared to LyX version 1.0.3?
--------------------------------------------------
LyX 1.0.4 is mainly a bugfix update to 1.0.3, but some
new features has been included:
- DocBook support.
- RevTeX4.
- Better printing with custom pagesizes.
- Several language files updated.
- And several bugfixes to math and table.
What's new in 1.0.3 compared to LyX version 1.0.2?
--------------------------------------------------
LyX 1.0.3 is mainly a bugfix update to 1.0.2.
- improved dependency tracking when running LaTeX (fixes one important
bug in 1.0.2).
- new italian and walloon localizations of the user interface.
- New slovene and spanish translations of the Tutorial.
What's new in 1.0.2 compared to LyX version 1.0.1?
--------------------------------------------------
LyX 1.0.2 is a minor update to LyX 1.0.1. Besides fixing many bugs
compared to version 1.0.0, it adds the following features:
- Improved reLyX: supports EPS image inclusion and works in windows.
- New french translation of Intro.lyx and Tutorial.lyx; new german
translation of UserGuide.lyx.
- Better multipart document support.
- LyX is now able to parse your BibTex files and show a list of
entries.
- New broadway textclass (for plays).
What's new in 1.0.1 compared to LyX version 1.0.0?
--------------------------------------------------
LyX 1.0.1 is a minor update to LyX 1.0.0. Besides fixing many bugs
compared to version 1.0.0, it adds the following features:
- Support for selecting pages and number of copies in print dialog
- New function 'Replace all' in Find&Replace popup
- Support for optional argument of \sqrt in math editor
- Support for literate programming with the 'noweb' program
- New LaTeX document classe: APA
What's new in 1.0.0 compared to LyX version 0.12.0?
----------------------------------------------------
LyX 1.0.0 is a stable release. Besides fixing many bugs compared to
version 0.12.0, it adds the following features:
- much improved reLyX script: many bugs have been fixed, new options
have been added, many constructs are now correctly handled. reLyX is now
installed along with LyX and has its own man page. Separate upgrades
of reLyX will be made available later. The reLyX script is utilized
by the File->Import LaTeX command in LyX.
- Much improved LinuxDoc (sgml-tools) support: multiple textclasses,
footnotes, and generally better output.
- New textclasses scrartcl, scrbook, scrreprt and scrlettr
implementing the corresponding classes of the koma-script
package. New textclasses latex8 for some IEEE journals, IEEEtran for
various IEEE Transactions journals and ejour2 for some Springer Verlag
Journals. New textclass hollywood to typeset your own film scripts.
- Better support (keyboard bindings, keyboard mappings, and/or menu
and error message translations) for several languages.
- Documentation has been partly translated to German, Swedish, and Czech. You
will get this automatically from the Help menu if you set up the LANG
environment variable correctly (i.e. to 'de' or 'sv').
- Documentation has been generally improved and expanded.
- Improved table support.
- Support for arbitrary line spacing in documents.
- easier handling of index entries.
- The printer configuration scheme has changed a bit to help people
whose dvips is not configured correctly. As a consequence, you might
have to modify your lyxrc a bit. All users are advised to re-run
Option->Reconfigure to update LyX configuration.
Note that your existing global lyxrc file will not be overwritten by
default since now LyX only installs a file lyxrc.example to use as
template.