LyX Development News

Remember those tips I promised were only a couple of hours wait away last month. They're finally in a publishable state. It took less than hour to do but it took a couple of weeks to find that hour ;-)

More new tips next month. Thanks José.

Development of LyX continues at a rapid pace. Angus Leeming has been very busy splitting the view and control components of all the existing GUII dialogs. This work is designed to make porting to other toolkits a lot simpler since almost everything common between ports is now in the shared control component.

Lars is busy introducing namespaces into the code. Jean-Marc is holidaying [at a conference] in Alaska.

Michael Koziarski has been working with Baruch Even to keep the GNOME port alive and has added a couple of new dialogs. Check the GUII status page for the latest state of the ports.

After much discussion and arguement about the button controller, which is used to control the activation of the Okay, Apply, Restore and Cancel buttons as well as disabling widgets when the document is read-only) I decided to write the ultimate state machine implementation so everyone could satify their wildest dreams. It's not completely implemented but is fully specified -- 30 percent code and 70 percent documentation! There's also a small update patch.

There is a new dialog controller hierarchy in the pipeline also -- although it's fairly similar to the existing implementation.

A spin-off from this work was an idea for a macro-recording system for LyX. Between us, Lars and I have provided some sample code for doing this. Now all we need is the time to put it all together.


Quote of the Month

Being a LyX developer is like being on the PTA. When you start complaining, you better be prepared to do the work. ;-)

Kayvan Sylvan


B0rken

I won't do anything (major) woth LyXParagraph before we begin ripping out the old !NEW_INSETS stuff.
btw. what do people say... can I begin the ripping?

Lars Gullik Bjønnes

Uh... I would not mind if mathed was not the only semi-functional area ;-)
It's always nice to have company.

André Pönitz


How long is an email?

I would vote more than 50K, if not all the way to 500. An Allan-length mail with a 20K or 30K patch might get over the 50K limit.

Amir Karger


Super Herbert

Easy. We need to add the correct macros for latex to do this and it will. Should be in the documentation of graphicx, though Herbert probably can quote it out of his sleep, so it might be easier than reading the latex docs :-)

Baruch Even


Update: LyX-1.1.6

Still waiting for 1.1.6fix2? Don't worry, it'll be worth the wait. Jean-Marc Lasgouttes put out a final call for any final essential bug fixes and got several fixes. Most of these are small but there are a couple of outstanding portability issues with the use of Libsigc++. Sun's CC is particularly fussy. However, with considerable assistance (and patience) from Michael Schmitt quite a lot of progress has been made.


Disruptions: Web, Mail and Anonymous CVS

One of our servers is missing. The hard disk died and as a result there have been some breaks in service. Lars has been working to fix the system and upgrade its installation during the outage. As a result, the main lyx web site was offline for a few days and anonymous cvs still isn't working.

The developers have had access to the developer-only cvs server so development hasn't been halted. However, demand for anonymous cvs access was high enough that Lars has provided instructions for creating anonymous cvs mirrors:
rsync -avz baywatch.lyx.org::lyxcvs .

Before you rush off and get a complete copy of the LyX CVS repository be aware that it is about 130MB.

Kayvan Sylvan has provided an anonymous cvs mirror in California:
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.us.lyx.org:/cvs/lyx
cvs login


Cleanup: Mathed

André Pönitz and Lars started a small cleanup of the math editor sources two months ago in an effort to fix a few small bugs. André has since taken the lead and reimplemented most of the math macro code and large parts of the internal storage. Lots of little bugs have been fixed along the way and a few areas of the code are broken. However, André at least understands how most of the math code works which is more than the rest of us can say. Very few of these fixes will get into the 1.1.6fix series because they involve significant internal changes.


Mail Threads: LyX Users

José Matos

Standard Disclaimer

The tips that are here are only some of all those that appeared in the LyX Users Mailing list. If you have a tip that you think is worth including, please post it to the LyX users' list, with a note, and I will post it in the next edition.

Keep note of Herbert Voß's site, the tips are presented by subject, and the site is updated often with new tips. Thanks Herbert.

FAQs of the month

Wish list

Jan Ulrich Hasecke asks for a way to pipe a text region to a shell command.

PDF

Fonts

Dekel Tsur says (sorry no link from mail-archive):

Good TTF fonts are available from Microsoft. (Editor's note: these links have been reset to those of the corefonts.sf.net project):

Arial
Times
Courier

They can be extracted using cabextract. See the corefonts.sf.net web page for details.

(note that these TTF fonts will not used by the math editor when displaying greek letters/symbols).

Fax

FoilTeX

LyX at work

Tables

Customisation tips

LyX Tips

Miscellanea


Coming Attractions