# LyX

Developed by Screenshot of LyX 1.5 under Windows The LyX Team 1999 1.6.2 / 2009-03-15; 21 days ago C++ Cross-platform Multilingual (23) Active Document processor GNU General Public License 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 of and information within 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 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 (up to version 1.3.x only), Windows, and Linux. LyX can be redistributed and modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License and is thus Free Software.

## Features

• 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

## History

Matthias Ettrich started developing a shareware program called Lyrix in 1995. It was then 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 a word processor by the 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.[4]

## Versions

• LyX 1.0.0 was released on February 1, 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 1.6.0 was released on November 10, 2008.

## Pronunciation

According to the project's wiki, the developers pronounce LyX as IPA[lɪks] or [lʏks].[5]