LyX Development News

There is life outside computers. Yes, really. I don't just mean the Big Blue Room either. My recent short holiday in Victoria was terrific. Of course it helps if you spend time with good friends. Thanks Russell. Thanks Emma. The Great Ocean Road is everything the tourist guides say it is and more -- that's where you'll find wind-swept, ocean-pounded, rocky outcrops and cliffs.

While in Melbourne for the Bach Festival that was part of the Melbourne Festival I got along to several different street and theatre performances and can definitely recommend Strange Fruit and a must-see little troupe called "born in a taxi".

If you're in Melbourne between now and the 25th of November get along to the Women's Circus production "The Island". I missed it but did get to see "Women's Circus Photographs". which is a free exhibition at the Arts Centre.

On a more serious note I have to wind back my LyX involvement even further and concentrate on finishing my thesis. I'll still write LDN but codewise I'll have to restrict myself to testing (use LyX to write my thesis) and bug fixes (those annoying ones that stop me from doing my writing). Now that Angus is working wonders pumping out GUII XForms dialogs I feel I can safely step back and hand my baby over to him. I want to put together a History of LyX GUII similar to the A Brief History of ERT I did in the third issue. That'd make a nice fat entry for the tenth issue if I can get it done for next month.

I didn't get around to chasing up those missing mail archive links from last month's issue so they may never get done. I have a bunch of quotes that have been banking up so I'll use them all in this issue because I always seem to end up quoting something that appears a couple of hours before I publish LDN.

Quote of the Month

That's (mostly) fine with me, I was just trying to criticize code I had not written, in order to feel important :)

— Jean-Marc Lasgouttes

Another Quote

Anyway, I got like 8 million of these [compiler can't inline call warning messages].
Why does nearly every file compilation get this?

— Amir Karger

That just shows how many files are dependent upon the use of maps and other tree based STL containers.

— Allan Rae

Oh, so actually we should be *proud* we're getting so many warnings, because it shows how STL-compliant we are now!

— Amir

From what I read in the STL sources, it seems that a creative programmer decided to declare 'inline' a recursive function. We are lucky that the compiler does not generate a 10Gb+ binary :)

— Jean-Marc Lasgouttes

Yet Another Quote

I _never_ said that (it is Asger and Jürgen that claims that their code do not have bugs), my code ave bugs all the time.

— Lars Gullik Bjønnes

What means "claim" here?! There are NO bugs in our code!

— Jürgen Vigna

I said "claim" only in the context that making a formal (mathematical) proof that your code does not contain bugs take too much time.

— Lars

The Friday the 13th Quote

Angus Leeming encountered some problems compiling LyX because a C library function didn't exist on his system.

Tru64 Unix 4.0f running on a Dec Alpha. Don't give me shit about upgrading my entire system to run a bloody word-processor ;-).

— Angus Leeming

I don't care shit about word-prcessors, I care about modern C++ programs. (and in this case modern C programs).

— Lars Gullik Bjønnes

So we'll be able to drop autoconf soon? We just have to replace the INSTALL file with:

LyX only works with modern compilers and operating systems. If your system does not conform to latest standards, do not even bother to ask (especially on fridays).

— Jean-Marc Lasgouttes

Jupp, that should do it.

— Lars Gullik Bjønnes

Remember Friday is No-Smiley Day.

The Quote from just hours before LDN is released and isn't in the archive yet

BTW, I see you use Xform in a lot of names. The real name of the toolkit is Xforms, but maybe you just don't care :)

— Jean-Marc Lasgouttes

I think Lars would reply "Nada, nada, nada...", but since I've no idea what this means I'll just say, "So sue me"!

— Angus Leeming

In portuguese that means:
    nothing, nothing, nothing
or
    swim, swim, swim
Now you choose. ;-)

— José Matos

Belated Thank You: Scary Equations

Way back in July, Walter Landry, answered my call for scary equations to include in my LyX presentation for the Conference on Computational Physics. Walter wrote his thesis on fully relativistic simulations of coalescing neutron stars so this should fit in very nicely with the conference.

Rolling along: LyX-1.1.6

The first prerelease was made available on the 26th of October but only announced on the developers list. The second prerelease should be out in a couple of days and will be announced on both the developers and users lists. I'd encourage regular users to try it out and help us fix whatever small problems remain. PO file maintainers should also use this coming release to update their translations. A third prerelease will follow later to incorporate whatever updated PO files are received and test any fixes resulting from bug reports. If you aren't subscribed to any of the mailing lists, instructions for joining them and what they cover are available here.

One area that is seeing some complaints is the slow update of tabular insets. Dekel Tsur has done some investigating and found that parts of the tables are being redrawn up to three times. Jürgen Vigna has continued his work on improving support for tabulars including some Purify reports from Jean-Marc. Jürgen has since done some work on resolving the multiple-redraw problem but is concentrating on fixing other problems before worrying about optimizing the redrawing. It looks likely that 1.1.6 may have slower, more capable tables than 1.1.5 unless someone chips in to help Jürgen speed up the redraws.

Update: GUI Independence

A few days before I left on holidays I posted my TODO list of jobs required before 1.1.6 to the developers list encouraging Angus to start work on it while I was away. Well, I got back to a very pleasant surprize: Angus had almost finished the entire list! As a result the Preferences dialog now allows you to change the colour of nearly everything in LyX and to manage the various input and output formats you may wish to convert from or to. Perhaps I should write TODO lists more often!

There have been a couple of long implementation and ideas discussions during this time. An on-going discussion of what should be in the Preferences dialog and one on problems arising in other ports as a result of Angus's implementation experiments in the XForms port.

Mail Threads: LyX Developer

José Matos

• Rick Hawk is back again. His return originated a long thread regarding usability and everything.
  During this thread the character of vi users was also clearly stated, as an excellent answer to John Levon's post. This only confirms what we always knew. [Ed. note: I am in no way biased.]
  This also sparked an old discussion from Jules Bean regarding the Human-Machine Interface.
• Jean-Marc had several attempts to encourage involvement in the 1.1.5fix2 work. All used variations on popular slogans or movie quotes as their subjects.
• André Pönitz pointed out a possible solution to allow the use of sstringstreams on platforms where it is missing. After some adapting work from Lars this cleaned lots of files that where plagued with preprocessor conditionals (#ifdef #else #endif).
• That wasn't André's sole contribution, as a new siamltex.layout was created.
• A No-GUI lyx is a few steps closer and makes command line exports a lot less complicated (no X-server required).
• Some changes in the math bindings almost caused riots although since we do not see any tumults we should infer that some consensus was attained.
• Some excerpts from Allans contribution.
• Here we have a perfect example of a good bug report. Jürgen appreciated that.
• Angus is working really hard to clean lyx code with visible results as pointed in the last LDN.
• Different solutions where proposed to deal with notes but further work will be delayed till after 1.1.6.
• Lars' proposal for logical character styles.
• Another happy client: John Levon.
• As Lior pointed, it is never too much to refer to Herbert's LyX pages.

Mail Threads: LyX Users

Collected by José Matos, formatted by Allan

• Jean-Marc Lasgouttes showed how to have custom bullets AND French language.
• Kayvan Sylvan started a Templates collection.
• Herbert Voß showed how to put a logo on a title page
• Jan Goebel suggested a way to get text output (with preamble parsed).
• Herbert's Mini-FAQ that addresses the interaction between lyx math box and some commands.
• Dekel Tsur, pre-processing the latex code for Czech typography.
• Staffan Ringbom, rules to convert a professor to LyX with additional comments from Germán Poo Caamaño.
• Herbert: How to convert a table to a wide table.
• Herbert shows how to use the overcite package in a footnote.
• Herbert provided a startscript to delete lyxpipe.in and .out before executing lyx.
• Proposal for algorithm creation in article class.
• Jean-Marc Lasgouttes: Procedure for restricting the number of colors used by netscape for low color resolutions.
• Herbert: psfonts package location at CTAN.
• Herbert: Debian package link
• Herbert link to BibTeX documentation on the web.
• Herbert gave an example for the listings package (used for pretty program listings).
• Herbert showed how to write a dot over the vector symbol.
• Herbert suggested how to deal with long equations using breqn.sty.
• Tommi Rintala wrote a productive-writing treatise.
• José Luis Góz Dans asked about making posters in lyx and provided a link to great little site explaining how to make posters using LaTeX.
• Matěj Cepl provided a LaTeX to HTML conversion script that uses TTH.
• Matěj Cepl explained how to run BibTeX and build PDFs from the command line.
• Miyata Shigeru outlines options for Japanese and German multilingual documents..
• Herbert provided a script to deal with .bib files when using bibtopic.sty.
• Dekel Tsur showed how to fancy Proofs in LyX using proof.sty.
• Steffen Evers has a lyx2pdf script.
• Jonathan Pennington had problems creating an Exam layout for use with the exam design package.
• Paul E Johnson asked for help writing a book with LyX using the Kluwer style.
  [Ed. Paul's original email isn't in the archive the rest of the thread appears to be there though.]
• Herbert provided a trick for changing enumeration labels.
• Herbert put the list of tables and figures in an appendix.
• Yann Collete found MGV (motif ghostview). (Editor's note: link is now dead.)
• Herbert showed one way to change line space in a list (enumerate).
• Jean-Pierre Chretien provided a small macro set for changing line spacing in decription, enumerate and itemize lists.
• Herbert showed how to create 3 column TOC and Index list.
• Matěj Cepl provided a user point of view on the question of Why do we need 120+ variables to control LyX? that Allan raised.
  [Allan: I was just whinging about the number of things to implement]
• Herbert answered the question How do I get a series of underscores to show up as a solid line and not just a series of underscores? with a better way of drawing lines for fill-in-the-blanks forms.
• Philipp Lehman provided an excellent fonts mini-tutorial.
• Philipp Lehman also suggested a plan for setting the display fonts.
• Matěj Cepl created a contract package for LyX (style is according to the Czech tradition).
• Philipp Lehman used ghostscript to calculate the bounding box of a figure by converting from ps to eps. While Eric St-Jean provided another solution using ps2epsi.
• Pablo Funes wrote a FrameMaker MIF to LyX convertor.
• Herbert showed how to do polynomial divisions in Mathed.
• Herbert provided two ways to stack two words one on top of the other.
• Steffen Evers described future plans for his lyx2pdf script and it's new home.
• Peter Suetterlin showed one way to make a phone directory. While Herbert provided a different approach.
• Herbert showed how to create a new kind of float using the float package.
• Staffan Ringbom revealed that lyx means luxury in Swedish during a discussion about auto-labelling figures for easier referencing.
• Philipp Lehman provided a script to install true type fonts in one single step.
• Herbert showed how to remove the word "References" from a Bibliography section. There are two solutions depending on which document class you use.
• Matěj Cepl announced an l2h update that pre and postprocesses the file for better results when exporting to html. He said "...so that not everybody see on first glimpse, that it was originally LaTeX; just on the second one :-)"
• Jean-Pierre Chretien explained difference between plain and fancy pages when using the fancyhdr package.
• Jean-Pierre Chretien has a perl script which keeps track of the errors and warnings from LaTeX.
• Matěj Cepl wanted information on overfull \hboxes and Jean-Pierre Chretien suggested using the draft option for the document class.
• Andre Berger provided a quick way of viewing a pdf file from lyx. [Allan: lyx-1.1.6 will allow you to view any output format quickly and easily, all configurable from the Preferences dialog.]

As you can see from the list above Herbert Voß is our most valuable resource on the LyX users mailing list. Thanks Herbert.

Coming Attractions

• Maybe LyX-1.1.6 will be finished.
• LDN goes double-digits! Yes, it will be our 10th issue.
• History of LyX GUII...