Hello again! It's time for another woefully brief look at what's going on in the LyX world.
A new release of the stable version of LyX was made by Jean-Marc Lasgouttes on 17th December 2002, closely followed by LyX for Win32 the following day. This release fixes a couple of regressions in the 1.2.1 release, and also has a large number of other bug fixes, plus a new ijmpd class. Read the details in the announcement and download it from the usual place.
XForms head honcho Steve Lamont released the 1.0 release of XForms on Sunday 9th December. This is the first official open-source release of the toolkit LyX has relied on for so long; it has been released under the GNU LGPL. This release fixes a large number of bugs; if you're still using 0.88 or 0.89, it's worth trying out. You can get it here. A build should hopefully be as simple as "xmkmf -a; make ; make install". At the time of writing, no pre-built packages are available. This release should work fine with the current release of LyX, though you may experience problems with loading some EPS graphics.
One new facility I left out from the previous LDN is the new "lyx2lyx". The compatibility code for older LyX documents has been moved from LyX itself into this new Python script. It can currently handle LyX files dating back to at least LyX 1.0. This isn't just a useful cleanup for us developers, though. Its modular architecture gives us the possibility to load newer LyX files too. It's not currently implemented, but soon, sharing documents between users using different major LyX versions should be easier than ever: if you have a more recent version, you will be able to just tell lyx2lyx what file format version to save.
The script is still being worked on, so we're still looking for testers with complicated older documents to check that that it's working correctly. At the time of speaking there is one major known bug related to tables, and a couple of wrinkles. Try it out !
The LaTeX floatflt package allows you to insert side-figures such that the text is wrapped around it (though the shape is still rectangular). A hacky way to do this in LyX was present in the 1.1.6 series, but was removed in 1.2 for a number of reasons. Current CVS re-introduces this in a clean manner as a floating inset, written by Dekel Tsur, so you shouldn't need to use LaTeX directly any more.
The last LDN mentioned that the Qt frontend could not support non-latin1 languages properly (both in the localization of the menus, and in the document itself). With the help of some heroic testing efforts by Kornel Benko, these problems have been solved. The 1.3.0 release should have a Qt frontend that supports any of the usual locales, and can handle multiple-encoding documents with several languages just fine. Note that this is not yet complete Unicode support; for example, to insert a Cyrillic zhe character, you will have to set the language to Russian.
As we mentioned briefly last issue, LyX now has a bug tracker at bugzilla.lyx.org. We're often asked where bugs should be reported to and how, so here's a quick HOWTO.
Remember, not all the developers use bugzilla themselves, so it's probably most sensible to report the bug to the mailing lists first. As for feature requests, it's a good idea to raise the issue on the users' list first: discussion doesn't usually happen on bugzilla.
If you do decide to report a bug, it's important you supply us with enough information for us to fix it. At the very least, we need LyX version, and xforms or Qt library version (use lyx --version). If the bug is related to a particular LyX document, give us a minimal example document that reproduces the problem. This will all help the developers get round to fixing your bug quicker, so it's well worth the little extra effort.
This is just a partial list of some bugs recently fixed.
Lars Gullik Bjønnes committed a patch to fix the annoying super-fast scrolling when you drag a selection with the mouse. Jean-Marc Lasgouttes committed a fix for a table scrolling problem in the 1.2 series.
Bugzilla bugs marked as FIXED since the last LDN