LyX

"LYX" redirects here. LYX may also refer to the IATA airport code for Lydd Airport, which is operated by London Ashford Airport.

Screenshot of LyX 2.0.2 on GNOME, under Linux
Developer(s)	The LyX Team
Initial release	1995
Stable release	2.0.2 / November 30, 2011 (2011-11-30)
Development status	Active
Written in	C++, Qt 4
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	Multilingual (23)
Type	Document processor
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.lyx.org

LyX (styled as $\mathbf{L}\!{}_\mathbf{\displaystyle Y}\!\mathbf{X}$) is a document processor following the self-coined "what you see is what you mean" paradigm (WYSIWYM), as opposed to the WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") ideas used by word processors. This means that the user only has to care about the structure of and information within the text, while the formatting is done by LaTeX, an advanced typesetting system. LyX is designed for authors who want professional output with a minimum of effort and without becoming specialists in typesetting. The job of typesetting is done mostly by the computer, following a predefined set of rules called a style, not by the author. Specific knowledge of the LaTeX document processing system is not necessary but may improve editing with LyX significantly for specialist purposes.

Since LyX largely functions as a front-end to the LaTeX typesetting system, it can handle documents ranging from books, notes, and theses, to articles in refereed journals, letters, and anything else LaTeX can handle. LyX also supports right-to-left languages like Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew, and it has substantial support for bidirectional writing. LyX also supports Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. As of LyX 2.0 there is also basic support of XeTeX and LuaTeX that aims at supporting a broad range of scripts via direct Unicode support.

Although LyX is popular among technical authors and scientists for its advanced mathematical modes, it is increasingly used by social scientists and humanists for its bibliographic database integration and ability to manage multiple files. LyX has also become popular among self-publishers.

The LyX document processor is available for various operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, UNIX, OS/2 and Haiku. LyX can be redistributed and modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License and is thus Free Software.

Features

• GUI with menus
• Automatically-numbered headings, titles, and paragraphs, with table of contents
• Text is laid out according to standard typographic rules, including indents, spacing, and hyphenation
• Standard operations like cut/paste, spell-checking (using GNU Aspell)
• Notes
• Textclasses and templates similar to the \documentclass[arguments]{theclass} command in LaTeX
• BibTeX Support
• Table Editor (WYSIWYG)
• Math Editor (WYSIWYG)
• Ability to import various common text formats
  

  

  Screenshot of PDF document created with LyX
• Ability to natively export the document to DocBook SGML, XHTML and plain text
• SVN-support for collaboration.
• And others - see detailed list.

History

Matthias Ettrich started developing a shareware program called Lyrix in 1995. It was then announced on USENET where it received a great deal of attention during the subsequent years.

Shortly after the initial release, Lyrix was renamed to LyX due to a name-clash with a word processor by the Santa Cruz Operation. It was released under the GNU General Public License, which opened the project to the open-source community. The name LyX was chosen because of the file-suffix '.lyx' for the Lyrix-files.

Versions

• LyX 0.7.0 was released on October 24, 1995.
• LyX 1.0.0 was released on February 1, 1999.
• LyX 1.3.0 was released on February 7, 2003.
• LyX 1.4.0 was released on March 8, 2006.
• LyX 1.5.0 was released on July 27, 2007.
• LyX 1.6.0 was released on November 10, 2008.
• LyX 2.0.0 was released on May 8, 2011.

Besides the main distribution of LyX which requires installation there's also an unofficial portable version integrated with TeXLive called LyTeX.

Pronunciation

According to the project's wiki, the developers pronounce LyX as [ˈlɪks], like the English word "licks", or [ˈlʏks].

See also

• List of word processors
• Comparison of word processors
• Document processor
• Comparison of TeX editors
• Scientific WorkPlace - A commercial counterpart of LyX
• Qt 4 toolkit, which is used for the user interface in LyX.

External links

• Official LyX Website
• LyX Wiki
• A comparative review of Scientific WorkPlace and LyX in Journal of Statistical Software
• Collection of thesis and dissertation LyX-templates