LyX for Mac
Simplified front end for LaTeX.
Free
In English
Version 2.4.0When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission
LyX overview
LyX is a fully fuctional WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) frontend for LaTeX wnich allows users with no programming knowledge to get the full benefits of LaTeX. It differs from products such as TeTeX as one needs to know no code and can simply write and mark any text as a footnote of chapter heading etc., and then hit the PDF button to get a perfectly formatted output.
What’s new in version 2.4.0
- Work on LyX 2.4 started in August 2017, in parallel to the final preparations of LyX 2.3.0 (which has been released in March 2018). Since then, the LyX development repository has seen more than 8700 commits with contributions by 40 persons, ranging from singular contributions to about 2500 commits by the most active developer.
- LyX has been using Unicode (utf8) internally for a long time now. Unicode has also been used with the "modern" TeX engines (XeTeX, LuaTeX) by default. As of LyX 2.4, with LaTeX itself having switched to utf8 as default in 2018, LyX now also uses utf8 encoding per default in classic (pdf)latex.
- Starting with LyX 2.4, all documents can be transformed into ePub 3. This feature is implemented on top of the DocBook 5 export, and has the same limitations (mostly, Beamer documents are not supported).
- LyX 2.4 introduces a rewritten support for DocBook, updated for DocBook 5. Most notably, all LyX documents can be output as DocBook, using a specific layout is no more required.
- Previous versions of LyX generated XHTML 1 code, while LyX 2.4 will produce XHTML5 output with some semantic tags (
for all documents). The resulting files are closer to validity than previously. They can still be parsed as XML.
Full list of changes available here
LyX for Mac
Free
In English
Version 2.4.0
What users say about LyX
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(22 Reviews of LyX)
Comments
User Ratings
Jun 20 2024
Version: 2.4.0
This is the only technical word processor for the Mac. It has world-class writing capability throughout for all authors, technical or otherwise. Don't worry if you don't know what LaTeX is--just hit the "PDF" function and admire the beautiful, professional-looking output.
Jun 13 2019
Version: 2.3.2
With LyX available I don't know why anyone would want to use any LaTeX coding app.
Sep 29 2014
Version: 2.1.2
I wrote my entire PhD thesis with this wonderful software and Jabref years ago. The tracking function is good enough for collaboration between my advisor and me.
Good job!
Apr 25 2014
Version: 2.1.0
This is a very nice document preparation tool. My main usage case was to typeset notes with lots of math and also prototype journal articles. The disadvantages is that not everyone uses it so if you collaborate with anyone who doesn't use it (usually your boss) you have to switch to latex and also sometimes in order to publish you need to make micro-adjustments, which are usually one command in latex but require a lot of drilling in lyx. But this is understandable as there can be no perfect GUI. For the mac there is also the problem is that it is not retina ready and this does not seem to be a priority for the developers (also understandable since it requires an update of the toolkit and all the bindings and probably that is too complicated). It is still perfectly usable of course, but add this all up and a modern latex editor with live preview seems to be more practical these days. And I say this after using lyx for 10 years. I still recommend it as an educational tool for latex or for the people who are not very demanding with their documents (i.e. they don't need to publish). For whoever wants to use latex for publishing (or for collaboration), there is no way to escape learning it in the end and using lyx will simply delay the inevitable.
