latex:accessible math

[Don Raikes]

Jason,

What special emacs modes/templates would be useful for working with latex?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason White [mailto:jason at jasonjgw.net] 
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 2:47 AM
To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
Subject: Re: latex:accessible math

Scott D. Henning <speakup at linux-speakup.org> wrote:
>The response about LaTex from Liz is right on. I actually use LaTex 
>often for work that might be done in Word, once you get over the first 
>hump to learn it and get some templates built, it is easy to re use 
>them.  Since I am only legally blind, I can tell the output is really 
>good and you are less likely to "break" the document in LaTex than a 
>word processor that takes any keystroke or mouse move as a command.

In 1998 I switched from WordPerfect (a word processor) to LaTeX for all of my writing (aside from Web pages, which are prepared in HTML).

I much prefer LaTeX to a word processor. With LaTeX, I can tell exactly what is in my document simply by reading the source text. The typeset quality is better than that of a word processor, according to publishers and specialists in typography who have used LaTeX for professional purposes. AUCTeX mode in Emacs is a very convenient tool to reduce typing and make entry of the LaTeX commands more convenient. LaTeX is actually a macro system built upon the underlying TeX typesetting tool, and as such, it's programmable.

I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in LaTeX. I wrote law school essays in LaTeX - no mathematics involved in those. My CV is in LaTeX as well. Handouts for university presentations can easily be written in LaTeX. There are classes and packages for these and many other applications.

You can read the generated PDF file with braille or speech output to some extent by converting it to text with the pdftotext tool.

As others have mentioned, there are numerous tutorials and sources of documentation available online. You are welcome to ask me if you would like some references to suitable material.

The only circumstance in which I would use a word processor is a situation requiring collaborative editing of a document with a person who does not use LateX.

Also, if you're preparing documents in LaTeX, you should learn how to use a revision control tool such as Git to track changes to your work. Git is especially good for this, as there is an option that will give you word-by-word diffs rather than line-by-line, and it will even take TeX/LaTeX syntax into account if you specify the right option.


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