RevTeX 4, which is the American Physical Society's class(es) for LaTeX2e, is currently in its fourth beta, which they claim will be the last. Those of you who've been around for a while will recall that RevTeX 3 worked only with LaTeX209, which required various kludges to work with LyX. Happily, RevTeX 4 not only uses LaTeX2e, but also takes great strides towards using standard LaTeX2e: it now uses natbib and bibtex, and they've gotten rid of a number of special RevTeX commands in favor of the LaTeX commands. The latest beta seems to take it even further, by removing RevTeX commands in favor of the AMSTeX equivalents (which means LyX will support them even better). All of this means that it should be relatively easy to get R4 working with LyX. I wrote a revtex4.layout when they were in their first or second beta. Is there any possibility that someone could make the couple tweaks that might be required for the latest beta and then test it on some documents? (E.g., writing from scratch or importing into LyX from LaTeX!) Since revtex4.layouth is in the recent stable releases as well as CVS, all you need to do is install revtex4 (from http://publish.aps.org/revtex4/) and Options->Reconfigure your LyX and it should be working! I don't have that much time to play with it right now, and I don't have a lot of revtex docs sitting around either. However, I'd be happy to help with any specific problems that crop up. As I mentioned a year or so ago when R4 first came out, the APS folks seem at least slightly interested in LyX. I think computer-phobic physicists are a wonderful market for LyX, as most of them really don't want to have to learn LaTeX. A lot of people use RevTeX, and I suspect APS will be pushing more and more to do so. I'll bet we could get the APS to endorse LyX as an easier way to submit electronically, and that would be a real step towards LyX world domination. The cygwin port and the upcoming GUI independence can only help. I remember at least one person (Ben?) was playing with revtex4. Any takers? You don't have to be a LyX or LaTeX guru to do this; just someone who has used (or wants to use) RevTeX. -Amir
