After too long in development we were finally able to release LyX
1.1.6. It won't be this long till next verion (promises, promises...).

As with all of the 1.1.x versions of LyX, this release contains a lot
of new code: in particular, more than half of the changes described in
the ChangeLog (which dates back to the 1.1.0 release) concern LyX 1.1.6!

Besides the usual under-the-hood changes, LyX 1.1.6 has many
new user-visible features. The main visible feature is that the
GUI-independent branch of development has been merged, as well as code
from the older development version.

You can get it at:

    ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/stable/lyx-1.1.6.tar.gz
    ftp://ftp.devel.lyx.org/pub/lyx/lyx-1.1.6.tar.gz

RPM's will be provided later.


Warning!:
One warning before we list the new features: The file format in LyX
1.1.6 is not backwards compatible to 1.1.5 and previous versions, so
you should be carefull before upgrading.

- many popups have been rewritten to use the new GUI-I scheme. In the
  process they have received a nice cleanup: the Document and Paragraph
  popups now contain in one single place what was previously scattered
  in many places. Similarly, the citation and cross reference popups
  have been overhauled.

- LyX now has a Preference popup where you can change most of your
  lyxrc settings.

- the menus can now be defined in a text file, and they automatically
  display the keyboard bindings associated with commands.

- it is now possible to provide your own icons for the toolbar.

- last but not least, work has begun on a KDE and a Gnome frontend for
  LyX. They are not officially supported for this version, but this
  will give you an idea of what is happening.

Other major changes in 1.1.6 include:

- the table support has been completely rewritten. It is now a modular
  object (inset), each cell of which owns a (also) newly written text
  inset. This now permits automatic text-wrap inside a tabular
  cell (if you define a width), multiparagraph mode AND setting of
  layouts for the paragraphs (lists inside a tabular cell!). Last but
  not least, a wide tabular now scrolls automatically so that all of it
  is visible without the need to enlarge the window!

  While there are as yet no other new features, they will be now MUCH
  easier to add. It may be that because of being "young" code some
  features may not work right now, but at least it is much
  better than before.

- new external material inset: this is a new kind of very powerful
  inset which will allow LyX to interface intelligently with external
  applications. Among other good things, it will finally allow you to 
  include GIF, JPEG, TIF, PNG, or just about any other raster format
  images in your document. It will even do an approximate ascii
  rendering when you do Ascii export if you have gifscii installed.

- The code which converts from LyX format to anything else (for
  viewing or exporting purposes) and from anything else to LyX has been
  rewritten. In particular, it is now possible to export to PDF, and to
  import from HTML/MSWord. In fact it's now possible to add new import/export
  formats without recompiling LyX by specifying external programs or scripts
  in lyxrc settings 
  (note that the old import/export lyxrc settings no longer work).

- LyX can do command line exports without opening any GUI components.

- The multilingual support has been improved. It is now possible to use in a
  document languages with different encodings, e.g. German (iso8859-1) and
  Czech (iso8859-2). Such a document can be viewed on screen using an
  iso10646-1 (Unicode) font. However, it is (currently) not possible to
  have differently encoded languages in the same paragraph.
  The languages and the encodings are defined in text files.

- Improved support for Hebrew and Arabic (also present in 1.1.5fix2).

- included files work now with docbook and linuxdoc; new layout
  docbook-book.

- PSpell library and Aspell spell checker support now included thanks
  largely to Kevin Atkinson (PSpell and Aspell maintainer). 

And finally, there have been a lot of smaller changes, which are
mentioned here for your information

- the menu entry File->New does not prompt for a file name by default
  (this can be changed in preferences).

- new -geometry command line option, which replaces the old -width,
  -height, etc.


  Lars Gullik Bjønnes