LyX

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"LYX" redirects here. LYX may also refer to the IATA airport code for London Ashford Airport.

L_YX

Screenshot of LyX 1.5 under Windows
Developed by	The LyX Team
Latest release	1.5.5 / May 11, 2008 (2008-05-11); 32 days ago
Preview release	Through SVN
Written in	C++
OS	Cross-platform
Development status	Active
Genre	Document processor
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://www.lyx.org

$\mathbf{L}\!{}_\mathbf{\displaystyle Y}\!\mathbf{X}$ (written as LyX in plain text) is a document processor following the self-coined "what you see is what you mean" paradigm (WYSIWYM), as opposed to the WYSIWYG ideas used by word processors. This means that the user only has to care about the structure and content of 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, and 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^[1], Persian^[2], and Hebrew^[3], and it has substantial support for bidirectional writing. Prior to 1.5.0, there was a separate release that supported Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, but these have been incorporated into LyX since then.

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 excellent bibliographic database integration and ability to manage multiple files. LyX has become especially popular among self-publishers, including even novelists, because LyX combines the ease of use of a word processor with the typesetting abilities of LaTeX.

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

1 Features
2 History
3 Pronunication
4 Support and development
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] 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 export the document to DocBook SGML, thus opening the way to document processing with SGML tools, like Jade, Openjade, pdfTeX and pdfJadeTeX, that make it possible to produce consistently formatted documents in HTML, PDF, PostScript, RTF, TXT and other formats from one LyX source (single-source publishing), see Document processing with LyX and SGML

[edit] History

Matthias Ettrich started developing a shareware program called Lyrix in 1995.
Soon after, it was 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 proprietary software (a word processor by 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.
LyX 1.0.0 was released in 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 1.5.4 was released on February 24, 2008.
LyX 1.5.5 was released on May 11, 2008.