[Blindmath] Translating LaTeX Files into Braille

[Michael Whapples]

I personally think that the LaTeX support in duxbury is poor. It seems
to be only a very specific subset of LaTeX it supports and when I was at
university we found that using scientific notebook made very little
difference. In the end we created a script to filter out all the LaTeX
which duxbury wouldn't manage.

I don't understand why the file you generated from scientific notebook
appears blank to duxbury. Couple of things you can try:
Open the saved output from scientific notebook in a text editor like
notepad, does the tex file actually contain something?
What does duxbury do if you give it the original tex file?

Unfortunately custom solutions seem to be quite common from what I hear.

I note from your email address that you are in Canada, not knowing what
Braille maths code is used there, here are some pointers for some other
LaTeX accessibility projects.

For UK code I wrote my own translator BrlTex (http://brltex.sf.net).
For nemeth code, there is the latex-access project (http://latex-sf.net)
which improves jaws ability to read tex files.
There are others, some commercial which can work with LaTeX but are more
as editors so I don't know what they're like to use for reading
documents (eg. infty reader, wintriangle with LaTeX to triangle, etc).

Hope some of this might help.

Michael Whapples
On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 02:46 -0500, Sarah Jevnikar wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm trying to translate LaTeX files into Braille and I'm having trouble.
> Here's what I've been doing.
> 1. Open .tex file in Scientific Notebook 5.0.
> 2. Resave it as another .tex file. I've heard this makes it possible for
> Duxbury to interpret all the commands in the file.
> 3. Open the new file in the Duxbury Braille Translator 10.4 as a print
> document in "teX or LaTeX format".
> At this point, despite the fact there was text in the scientific notebook
> file, the newly-saved one comes up blank in Duxbury. I can't translate it
> into Braille because there is nothing to translate. I tried copying and
> pasting text directly from scientific notebook into Duxbury and Brailling it
> that way, but then the Braille contains all the LaTeX commands and no math
> symbols.
> Any suggestions as to what I can do?
> Thank you,
> Sarah Jevnikar
> 
> 
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