LyX

LYX (LyX in plain text) is a document processor following the 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.

Although LyX is popular among technical authors and scientists, for its advanced mathematical modes, it is increasingly also been used by social scientists and others for its excellent bibliographic database integration and multiple file managing and organising features. Based on a document preparation system for TeX typesetting, LyX can handle documents ranging from books, notes, theses to articles in refereed journals. It also supports right-to-left languages like [http://cs.haifa.ac.il/~dekelts/lyx/ Hebrew and Arabic]. A separate release for Chinese, Japanese and Korean language support is available.

The LyX document processor is available for various operating systems like several Unix platforms including Mac OS X, OS/2, Microsoft Windows/Cygwin and Linux. A Microsoft Windows port that does not need Cygwin/X has recently been released. LyX is an open source software that can be redistribute and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

=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 *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 *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, portable document format, PostScript, RTF, Txt and other formats from one LyX source (single-source publishing), see [http://www.karakas-online.de/mySGML/ Document processing with LyX and SGML]

=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 commercial software (a word processor by Santa Cruz Operation). It was released under the GPL, which opened the project to the Open source community. The name LyX was chosen because of the file-suffix .lyx for the Lyrix-files. *Version 1.0.0 of the software was released in 1999. *Current version 1.3.6 was released on July 16, 2005.

=Support and development=

LyX has an active development community and a thriving mailing list for user support and discussions.

=See also=

*LATEX *

=External links=

*[http://www.lyx.org/ Official LyX Website] *[http://wiki.lyx.org/ LyX Wiki] *[http://www.lyx.org/donations.php/ Donations and funding]