LyX Development News

Harry Truman, a servant of Realpolitik, wearing the face of Oliver Hardy, looked upon his work and saw that it was good. But beside him, Albert Einstein, a servant of that most elusive and gnomic of gods, Truth, burst into tears, the familiar tears of Stanley Laurel facing the consequences of his own karma. For a brief instant, Truman was troubled, but then he remembered the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.

And that was the third Vision.


Quote of the Month

Not to overemphasize, but changing the document's content unrelated to user actions can provoque stress, anxiety, severe heart diseases, and eventually, death.

- Alfredo Braunstein


LyX 1.3.1 released

In an event celebrated and lauded in equal measure, a new stable version of LyX was released by Jean-Marc Lasgouttes. This includes a number of important bug fixes and improvements - check out the announcement for the details. LyX 1.3.1 for Win32 and CJK-LyX 1.3.1 are also available.


A native Win32 port

LyX runs on Microsoft Windows, but it currently requires Cygwin, a UNIX environment package, and a suitable X server. This is handy, but it can be quite a pain to install all these packages just to run LyX. For some time, Ruurd Reitsma has made available a Qt-based native port of LyX. This is downloadable here. The port currently requires some patches against the LyX source; it is expected that these will be gradually merged into the LyX codebase. If you find Cygwin too heavy a burden, Ruurd's port is probably worth a try.


Deleting empty paragraphs

Alfredo Braunstein started a long discussion about how LyX handles empty paragraphs. As you are probably aware, entering empty paragraphs via "Return" would have no real effect in LyX, as any such attempts to introduce whitespace does not affect the LaTeX typesetting; this is an important part of the WYSIWYM concept.

For a long time, LyX has handled this by immediately deleting an empty paragraph at the first opportunity. However, this has led to some ugly code; furthermore, it is not a good user interface: the user will start a new paragraph, move the cursor to copy some text, then be very irritated when their new paragraph goes away right from under their noses.

Alfredo made a patch to introduce a "horizontal cursor" instead. Along the discussion several other options were considered, mostly summarized by Alfredo towards the beginning of the discussion. Each solution has its own merits and disadvantages; as of yet, the developers haven't reached agreement on what solution, if any, should be adopted.


Recent developments

Nothing particularly exciting to report this month. Work has mostly focused on trying to clean up the old, ugly code in the LyX core, spear-headed by Lars Gullik Bjønnes, Alfredo Braunstein, John Levon, and André Pönitz. A number of important changes have been made, and some really "fun" bugs have been introduced into the development tree; work is continuing on cleaning this up. As always, those brave enough to help test these changes are more than welcome.


Bugwatch

This is just a partial list of some bugs recently fixed.

A large number of spellchecking problems should be fixed in the forthcoming 1.3.2. LyX was reading figure subcaptions from older files incorrectly, this is now fixed.

Bugzilla bugs marked as FIXED since the last LDN

IDLyX versionSummary
85 CVS Label dialog buttons
365 CVS linebreak (wrap) with insets boundaries
388 CVS Scrolling can still make accidental selections
548 CVS displayed math can be shown as inline
550 CVS change environment depth deselects selection
656 1.3.2 Double quotes in subfigure labels confuse LyX on reading file
851 1.3.2 spell error messages are not passed on to the user in some cases
852 CVS qt cross-ref dialog has no apply button
896 1.3.2 closing spell dialog does not end session (write out added words etc.)
900 1.3.2 Documentation for Preamble needs to be changed
908 CVS qt 3.1.1: bullets pixmap drawn incorrectly
913 1.3.2 Attempt to navigate to deleted TOC entry crashes
937 1.3.2 Buttons are disabled in Search dialog if the document is read-only
938 CVS File->Revert confirm dialog is nonsense
944 1.3.2 src/frontends/xforms/forms/fdfix.sh is not reentrant -- SMP make dist fails
955 CVS Properly remove math-greek and math-greek-toggle
965 CVS cursor not reset properly when ert goes from inlined to open
966 CVS ERT width can be < width of "ERT" label
978 CVS spell prefs are confusing when using libpspell/aspell
979 1.3.2 SIGSEGV signal caught when External Material is included
980 CVS paragraph separation dialog UI unclear
981 CVS Layout/Paper tabs in document dialog are too complex
982 CVS float placement in document dialog not usable
983 CVS "Open new document with this name ?" defaults to "no"
997 CVS Tooltip needed for Layout->Paragraph->Keep space
999 CVS rename of "Auto-apply" in Layout->Character