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