LyX 2.4.2 Released

Richard Kimberly Heck rikiheck at gmail.com
Thu Oct 3 21:04:55 UTC 2024


Public release of LyX version 2.4.2
===================================

We are proud to announce the release LyX 2.4.2, the second maintenance
release in the 2.4.x series.

This is almost entirely a bug-fixing release, with no significant new
features. However, some crashes have been fixed, and we have made some
significant improvements to display speed, which will be especially
noticeable on older or slower systems.

One important bug fixed in this release involves labels in captions
and some other constructs. These were wrongly \protect'ed in earlier
versions.

There has been a change (as of 2.4.0) in how the option to use vertical
space between paragraphs is handled. Previously, LyX simply modified
\parskip and \parindent, but this caused various problems (see bug
#4796). Now, we use the parskip package. As a result, however, and
to ensure there are no changes to old documents, when LyX files from
2.3.x and earlier are converted to the new format, if they were set to
use vertical space between paragraphs, the lyx2lyx conversion routine
adds
   % Added by lyx2lyx
   \setlength{\parskip}{\smallskipamount}
   \setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
to the preamble and, within LyX itself, resets the text layout to use
indentation (so we do not issue the new code for vertical spacing). The
net effect is that PDFs generated with LaTeX (etc) look right, but in
LyX itself indentation is used.

This will happen with any document created with 2.3.x or older. It can
also happen with documents created from templates created with 2.3.x
or older, and even with new documents, if you had previously set them to
use, by default, vertical space. Templates are just LyX files saved in
the templates/ folder, and the 'defaults' are simply saved in a
template file, defaults.lyx. Hence, if you want the new behavior, or
just want the LyX document to look `right', then you will need to make
two changes to the document or template: Remove what lyx2lyx added, and
then set Paragraph Separation to Vertical Space.

You can download LyX 2.4.2 from https://www.lyx.org/Download.

If you have trouble using LyX or have a question, consult the
documentation that comes with LyX (under Help) and the LyX wiki, which
you will find at https://wiki.lyx.org/. You can also send email to
the LyX users' list (lyx-users at lists.lyx.org). Bugs can be reported
on our bug tracker (https://www.lyx.org/trac/) or by writing the
developers' list (lyx-devel at lists.lyx.org).

The LyX team.
https://www.lyx.org


NOTE FOR PACKAGERS: Most of the packages indicate the version number as 
2.4.2.1. This is because we discovered and fixed a nasty bug after 2.4.2 
had already been packaged, and decided to delay the release. Although 
2.4.2 packages had not been officially released, they had been made 
available for testing. So, to avoid confusion between versions, we used 
a different number for the currently released packages.




What's new
==========

** Updates:
***********

* DOCUMENT INPUT/OUTPUT

- There was undocumented change how hyperlink insets are exported to
   xHTML format compared to LyX 2.3.x (type "File" is no more exported
   as http(s) link). We added details to the RELEASE-NOTES file.

- Load graphics after geometry, so page size is set properly (bug
   10970).

- Recognize .plt as a GnuPlot extension (bug 11148).

- Restore obvious "G" shortcut for Greyed Out notes.


* MISCELLANEOUS

- Update format of lyxrc.dist templates

- Update templates to use native vertical space method.


* USER INTERFACE

- Show font info in status line again.

- Make scrolling smoother when using selection.

- Show the temporary directory in About LyX dialog.

- Improve document output pane (bug 12902).

- Speedup interactive use by avoiding expensive math macros bookkeeping
   when possible.

- Make -geometry command-line option work on all platforms.

- Fix macOS bug, where XQuartz application would be launched for no
   reason (bug #13086).

- Fix problem with collapsing of outliner (bug 13098).


* DOCUMENTATION AND LOCALIZATION

- Update Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Czech, French,
   German, Italian, Polish and Slovak localizations of the user
   interface.


* BUILD/INSTALLATION

- Avoid bogus warnings when configuring for Qt6.



** Bug fixes:
*************

* DOCUMENT INPUT/OUTPUT

- When exporting to MathML, the argument of the \boxed{} macro is now
   correctly treated as math.

- Properly escape special characters (!, @, |) in nomenclature output.

- Handle linguistic structure trees in ePub and PDF (DocBook) output 
(bug 12372).

- Improve the way spaces are handled in labels when refstyle is used.


* USER INTERFACE

- Fix regression which marks document modified in case of external
   modification. Only file deletion will trigger the modification
   flag now (see bug 12819).

- Fix crash when using Save As... with previews enabled (bug 13091).

- Fix crash when attempting to search in selection that contains
   only math.

- Fix crash when copying some math formulas or exporting them to
   DocBook (bug 13069).

- Fix potential crashes when scrolling documents.

- Fix bug where the dialog asking for saving unapplied changes
   on buffer change popped up twice, or sometimes not at all (bug
   12954).

- Improve performance when selecting text on less powerful systems
   (bug 13050).

- Fix performance problems with references with (very) many authors.

- Fix problem that key bindings that include optional modifier keys
   could not be un- or re-bound (bug 12973)

- Enable OK/Apply button in tabular dialog when "Additional Space" combo
   has been set to different value.

- Fix ghost image on Windows with system colors (bug 13084).

- Restore old display of cross-references in the outliner. The change
   led to odd behavior on filtering.

- Display values of cross-references in tooltips for forward references.

- Disable vertical alignment in tables with variable width columns
   (tabularx and xltable), as this is not supported by the packages.
   Also fix the disabling mechanism in the table dialog.

- Fix display of integral limits on Windows (bug 13087).

- Fix crash when deleting tabs in a selection (with S-BackTab) in a
   text-only inset (ERT, Listings...).

- Fix display glitches when applying some operations to a selection.


* INTERNALS

- Fix possible crash in undo code after inserting note inset over a
   multi-paragraph selection.

- Fix a Python script, used to preview math expressions, that used a
   module that is removed in Python 3.13.

- Fix case where debug information may report all numbers as hexadecimal.

- Make sure that lyxclient name is initialized properly.


* TEX2LYX

- Fix import of nomenclature entries which contain '%' or '"' characters.


* BUILD/INSTALLATION

- Fix 'make install' target for autotools builds with autoconf >= 2.72.




More information about the lyx-devel mailing list