LyX is an open-source project now at its 1.0 release. There are stable and development strands, although recent changes to the development process (detailed below) should see all future releases are stable. The stable releases are very reliable and capable workhorses. Several users have reported writing 300+ page documents incorporating images and mathematical equations without any difficulties. In fact, all of LyX's documentation is written using LyX with the User Guide being over 120 pages long. LyX has one of the best WYSIWYG math editors around. If you know how to write maths in LaTeX you'll be amazed to see your formulas appear before your eyes. 

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The fourth meeting was hosted by Lars in Stokke, Norway. For four days 5 core developers, Lars, José, Asger, Jürgen and I (Allan), worked overtime to get wonderful new things added to LyX. I have some pictures from the meeting here and they are mirrored on the developers website in Norway.

José also has his pictures on the web.

Jürgen hosted the third and fifth meetings in Steinegg which is in the Italian Alps (beautiful!). He has a large collection of photos from these meetings and the first meeting in Copenhagen online.

• Use of std::streams (istream, ostream, fstream) [almost complete]
• Use of std::string [done -- further small cleanups likely]
• Use of the Standard Template Library (STL), [mostly done]
• Rearrangement of the directory structure, [done, but further to come with gui-indep etc.]
• Use of libtool, automake and autoconf. [done]
• GUI independence and Model-View-Control separation [dialogs done]

The old development strand has been put on ice and we will be backporting and improving on the changes we experimented with in that series. Thus, the developers gain a stable platform to build upon and users will get those wonderful new features sooner. In particular, the move to GUI and system independence will be a priority. Development will continue to use a CVS repository with each area of change having its own development branch. This will allow the developers to test their changes and get them stable before they are merged into the main code. Thereby, ensuring that each release should be very stable.

If you are interested in a particular area of development then you will be able to checkout the appropriate development branch using CVS. If you're unable to use CVS then contact one of the developers of that branch and ask them to make a snapshot available.

Our sixth release of the new series is lyx-1.1.6 and contains many of the significant changes listed above. This is the sixth transitional release and contains many bug fixes as well as completely rewritten table support. As a result, the file format has changed from earlier versions. It should be as stable as the 1.0.4 release although with all the changes it is certainly possible some new bugs have crept in. That said please consider at least trying it out on your old documents and contact the developers list if you find any bugs. Thanks.