[blindlaw] Drafting research papers on the Mac

[ALBERT ELIA]

Hello Rahul,

I get the best results using LaTeX. Are you familiar with it? Basically, it's a typesetting system where   you write source content with some markup, and build a PDF from it.

When I began law school, I wrote a LaTeX style package for legal citation. It's basic, and not as omniscient as I'd like, but it lets you switch back and forth between no citations (which I like for reviewing my writing for flow and clarity), footnote citations for law review articles, and inline citations for memoranda and other documents where that format is preferred.

You can get LaTeX for Mac for free  from the MacTeX site: http://tug.org/mactex/

While MacTeX comes bundled with a highly voiceover compatible editor called TeXShop, you might also wish to consider TaxPad, which is available from the Mac and iOS app stores, and has some nice features for managing complex documents, but if you're new to TeX, you probably want to start with TeXShop.

Finally, if you're looking to publish on the web, you could use MultiMarkdown with either ByWord or MultiMarkdown Composer. Both are available on the Mac app store (Byword is also an iOS app). MMD won't create pretty printed footnotes, but it will create numbered footnote links to a set of endnotes, which is convenient for web publishing.

Of course, there is always Pages as well. I have not used it much, but I know a few blind people who have done so, and my impression is that footnoting is available using  voiceover. I can't speak from experience, though.

Hope this helps.

--Al