LyX (styled as LYX; pronounced ) is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

document processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

based on the

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other ...

system. Unlike most

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

s, which follow the

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

("what you see is what you get") paradigm, LyX has a

WYSIWYM In computing, What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM, ) is a paradigm for editing a structured document. It is an adjunct to the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) paradigm, which displays the result of a formatted document as it will appear ...

("what you see is what you mean") approach, where what shows up on the screen roughly depicts the semantic structure of the page and is only an approximation of the document produced by

TeX Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...

. Since LyX relies on the typesetting system of LaTeX without being a full-fledged LaTeX editor itself, it has the power and flexibility of LaTeX, and can handle documents including books, notes, theses, academic papers, letters, etc. LyX's interface is structured so that while knowledge of the LaTeX markup language is not necessary for basic usage, new LaTeX directives can be added into the document to support more complex features during editing — though not at the level of full control a full-fledged LaTeX editor can provide. LyX is popular among technical authors and scientists for its advanced mathematical modes, though it is increasingly used by non-mathematically-oriented scholars as well for its bibliographic database integration and its ability to manage multiple files. LyX has also become a popular publishing tool among

self-publish Self-publishing is an author-driven publication of any media without the involvement of a third-party publisher. Since the advent of the internet, self-published usually depends upon digital platforms and print-on-demand technology, ranging fr ...

ers. LyX is available for all major operating systems, including

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

MacOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is an operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source operating system and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user ...

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

and

Haiku is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kire ...

. LyX can be redistributed and modified under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

and is thus

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

Features

LyX is a full-featured document processor. It provides

structured document A structured document is an electronic document where some method of markup language, markup is used to identify the whole and parts of the document as having various meanings beyond their formatting. For example, a structured document might identi ...

creation and editing, branches for having different versions of the same document, master and child documents, change tracking, support for writing documents in many languages and scripts, spell checking,

graphics Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of the data, as in design and manufa ...

table Table may refer to: * Table (database), how the table data arrangement is used within the databases * Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs * Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and column ...

editing, and automatic cross-reference (hyperlink) managing. LyX provides automatically numbered headings, titles, and paragraphs, with document outlining. It features a powerful mathematical formula editor with point-and-click or keyboard-only interface. LyX has native support for many document classes and templates available in LaTeX through \documentclass. User layouts and modules can be made for those missing. Text is laid out according to standard

typographic Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacin ...

rules, including ligatures,

kerning In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between Character (symbol), characters in a Typeface#Proportion, proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual le ...

, indents, spacing, and hyphenation. It provides BibTeX/BibLaTeX citation support, comprehensive cross-referencing and PDF

hyperlinks In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to data by a user's clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with ...

. LyX can import various common text formats. Documents can be processed in LaTeX, PdfLaTeX, XeTeX, and

LuaTeX LuaTeX is a TeX-based computer typesetting system which started as a version of pdfTeX with a Lua (programming language), Lua scripting engine embedded. After some experiments it was adopted by the TeX Live distribution as a successor to pdfTeX (i ...

typesetting systems or exported to

XHTML Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages which mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated. While HTML, pr ...

DocBook DocBook is a Semantics (computer science), semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of docume ...

EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

(via Docbook), and plain text. Versioning is provided through external control systems like SVN,

Git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

, RCS, and CVS. LyX supports

right-to-left A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

languages like

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, Persian, and

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

, along with support for

bi-directional text A bidirectional text contains two text directionalities, right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR). It generally involves text containing different types of alphabets, but may also refer to boustrophedon, which is changing text direction in ea ...

. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages are also supported. Documents can embed calculations via

Octave In music, an octave (: eighth) or perfect octave (sometimes called the diapason) is an interval between two notes, one having twice the frequency of vibration of the other. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been referr ...

or Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) like

Maple ''Acer'' is a genus of trees and shrubs commonly known as maples. The genus is placed in the soapberry family Sapindaceae.Stevens, P. F. (2001 onwards). Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Version 9, June 2008 nd more or less continuously updated si ...

, Maxima, and

Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

. Commands will be forwarded to the external programs and results will be embedded in the document.

History

Matthias Ettrich Matthias Ettrich (born 14 June 1972) is a German computer scientist and founder of the KDE and LyX projects. Early life Ettrich was born in Bietigheim-Bissingen, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany, and went to school in Beilstein, Württemberg, ...

started developing a shareware program called Lyrix in 1995. It was then announced on

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

, where it received a great deal of attention in the following years. Shortly after the initial release, Lyrix was renamed to LyX due to a name clash with a word processor produced by the company

Santa Cruz Operation The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO, pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants ...

. The name LyX was chosen because of the file suffix .lyx for Lyrix files.

Versions

LyX has no set release schedule. Releases occur when there are important bug fixes or significant improvements. The following table lists the dates of all major releases. For collaboration between different users using the same major release is recommended as LyX file format remains fixed within each major release (e.g. all minor LyX versions 2.3.0, 2.3.1, 2.3.2, ... use strictly the same file format).

References

External links

*
LyX WikiA comparative review of Scientific WorkPlace and LyX
in

Journal of Statistical Software The ''Journal of Statistical Software'' is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal that publishes papers related to statistical software. The ''Journal of Statistical Software'' was founded in 1996 by Jan de Leeuw of the Department of Stati ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lyx 1995 software Cross-platform free software Desktop publishing software Formula editors Free multilingual software Free software programmed in C++ Free TeX editors Free word processors Linux TeX software TeX editors TeX editors that use Qt TeX software for macOS TeX software for Windows

Features

History

Versions

See also

References

External links