Public release of LyX version 1.5.0 (release candidate 1)
===
We are glad to announce the release of LyX 1.5.0 (release candidate 1).
We encourage users to try this release candidate and report
any feedback or problems to lyx-devel at lists.lyx.org.
The difference to the last beta release is due to bug fixes only,
no new features are allowed at this stage of development. The only
exception to this rule is the addition of Farsi as a supported language
since the available patch was not integrated in the previous release.
Compared with the latest stable release, this is the culmination of
one year of hard work, and we sincerely hope you will enjoy the
results. The changes are too numerous to summarize in a few words,
with initial unicode support being the flagship among the new
features, see the end of this announcement for 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 latest 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 1.5.0rc1 here (the .bz2 are compressed with
bzip2, which yields smaller files):
ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-1.5.0rc1.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-1.5.0rc1.tar.bz2
Note that due to the amount of changes 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/
If you find what you think is a bug in LyX 1.5.0rc1, 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 1.5.0 (release candidate 1)?
* 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 current available), so that you can use LaTeX's new utf8
encoding or such brand new typesetting systems 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 in 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 from now on, former encoding settings for these languages
done via ERT or the document preamble will lead to LaTeX-errors!
* 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
