LyX

LyX is a document processor following the "what you see is what you mean" paradigm (WYSIWYM), as opposed to the WYSIWYG ideas used by many other 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 L^AT_EX.

LyX handles documents ranging from small articles to books with lots of cross-references and illustrations. Recent versions of the software support right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic. A separate release for Chinese, Japanese and Korean language support is available.

LyX acts as a front-end to L^AT_EX, an advanced typesetting system. Specific knowledge of the L^AT_EX document processing system is not necessary but may improve editing with LyX significantly.

LyX can also 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.

The LyX document processor is available for various operating systems like several Unix platforms including Mac OS X, OS/2, Windows/Cygwin and Linux.

LyX was first published under the name Lyrix, but had to be renamed because of a word processor by SCO of the same name. The name LyX was chosen because the file-suffix for Lyrix-files was already '.lyx'.

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
• Textclasses and templates similar to the \\documentclass[arguments]{theclass} command in L^AT_EX
• BibTeX Support
• Table Editor (WYSIWYG)
• Math Editor (WYSIWYG)
• Ability to export to PDF, text, and HTML formats
  

  History

• Matthias Ettrich started developing the shareware program 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 (see above). In the same timeframe, it was also released under the GNU General Public License, which opened the project to the open-source community.
• Version 1.0.0 of the software was released in 1999.
  

  BibTeX instructions

  
  To add a BibTeX reference in LyX can be confusing, here are a brief set of instructions:
  
  Note: means the name of your BibTeX citation key.