Update announce with small fixes

[lyx.git] / ANNOUNCE

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.

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.) 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 was implemented, which
provides beautiful and elegant tabulars.
 

* Nomenclatures

Native LyX support for the nomencl package was implemented. 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, that allowed to integrate all of the math panel' content to the
math toolbars.
Since this input method is much easier than the clumsy panel, the math
panel itself has been removed and superseded by the toolbars.

* Frontend News

LyX 1.5 will use the Qt4 toolkit. This is especially good news for
Windows users, since 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 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 were rewritten addressing
several problems that existed in the existing implementation.

* Converter file cache

A cache for converted files, such as included figures, was
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.

* Minor user interface improvements

Apart from the described major changes, several minor improvements of
the user interface have been made, such as:

 - Syntax highlighting for the user preamble and the LaTeX log file 
 - Better parsing of BibTeX databases (in the citation dialog) 
 - Support optional argument for environments 

* Enhanced clipboard/selection handling
 
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 middle button multiple times,
even after the selection has been cleared.


* 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 ;-)