[Blindmath] Accessible LaTeX

Andrew Stacey andrew.stacey at math.ntnu.no
Fri Nov 6 12:21:48 UTC 2009


On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 11:21:31AM +0000, P. R. Stanley wrote:
> Andrew
> you do not need to change anything. LaTeX source is just fine.
> I should expend my efforts on educating the readers on the benefits of 
> LaTeX rather than trying to make it less complicated with the so-called 
> solutions that are advertised on these lists.
> Blind people, most blind people, are smart enough to cope with a bit of 
> complexity. ( smile)

Assuming that this is true (yours is the first reply, so I don't wish to
presume on what the others may say), may I refine my question.  The conclusion
of this is that I should make the source available (well, it is already as it
is on the arXiv, but I should also make it available from my homepage).
Here's an extract from one of my papers:

  We denote \docat by \(\docat\) and \socat by \(\ocat\).
  We refer to the functor \(\docat \to \dcat\) which assigns to an \doobj the
underlying \dobj as the \emph{forgetful functor}.  We write the underlying
\dobj of an \doobj[\doobj] as \(\abs{\doobj}\).

How accessible is that?

I'm afraid that I have a rather heavy reliance on macros.

As a brief explanation, these particular macros are a sort of object oriented
TeX.  The last three characters, 'cat' and 'obj' in the above, indicate the
property that I'm referencing and the preceding characters, 'do', 'so', 'o',
and 'd' in the above, indicate the specific instance.  Thus 'dcat' is
a particular category, 'scat' is another (in this case the category of sets),
'dobj' is an object in the category 'dcat', and so forth.  As an author, it
was an incredibly useful bit of programming and I've been using it in
subsequent papers.  I realise that this may make me a bit of a special case,
but then I'm asking for advice for what I can do as well as general
principles.

Andrew




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