[Blindmath] A question about Microsoft Words equation editor

[Greg]

Hello,
I am a computer science major at college so I will be getting into some 
pretty complex math, such as calculas and probability and statistics.  Is 
there somewhere where I can go and learn about LATEX?
Thanks,
Greg Wocher
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Whapples" <mwhapples at aim.com>
To: "Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics" 
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 6:33 AM
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] A question about Microsoft Words equation editor


>I think that's a question without a definite answer. A short response would 
>be how hard do you want it to be.
>
> Here's a bit more information so you can make up your mind on how hard it 
> will be for you.
>
> LaTeX is quite a different way of working to editors such as word, this is 
> because LaTeX you are writing in plain text with special commands to tell 
> it about most non-alphanumeric symbols and formatting (eg. \alpha for the 
> greek letter alpha and \frac{x}{y} for the fraction x over y). As LaTeX 
> can be written using any text editor you won't have menus to help you find 
> the command you want (well some specific LaTeX editors may) so you will 
> want a good resource which you can refer to when you need help.
>
> To learn the very basics (eg. enough to use mathtype in the LaTeX input 
> mode or for very simple documents where you leave most of the formatting 
> to the LaTeX software to make a reasonable choice) I would say this isn't 
> hard to learn. Should you want to go further and gain full control of the 
> layout of your document, create macros to save typing, etc, well this does 
> mean learning more and could be harder. Sometimes when trying to achieve 
> something very specific you may not have clear documentation to explain it 
> (this depends on how rare what you want to do is) and so you may end up 
> piecing scraps of information from here and there together.
>
> Also there are a variety of packages you can get to extend the 
> functionality of LaTeX, obviously when using one of those you need to 
> learn the commands those introduce. As an example, there is a package 
> called beamer for producing presentations (an alternative to using 
> powerpoint), but if you aren't going to produce a presentation then you 
> don't need to learn about it.
>
> I would certainly recommend learning some of the basics as some software 
> uses LaTeX for plain text representation of the maths (eg. mathtype with 
> LaTeX input mode, wikipedia puts the LaTeX source for equations as the 
> alt-tag of the image, etc). If learning more would be worth it for you, it 
> really depends on how much maths you will be doing in the future and if 
> the way of working suits (it can be hard at first because you're used to 
> word, but give it time it may grow on you).
>
> Michael Whapples
> On 07/01/10 02:31, Greg wrote:
>> Hello,
>> How hard is LATEX to learn?  I never heard of it before I joined this 
>> list.
>> Thanks,
>> Greg Wocher
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Gardner" <john.gardner at orst.edu>
>> To: "Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics" 
>> <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 7:25 PM
>> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] A question about Microsoft Words equation editor
>>
>>
>>> MS Word 2007's native math editor has a display mode that is 
>>> quasi-accessible.  You'd need to add some symbols to your screen reader 
>>> dictionary and be willing to put up with a ton of parentheses.  If you 
>>> are lucky you might get somebody at Microsoft to help you a bit, but as 
>>> far as I know there are no tutorials for using this math editor with a 
>>> screen reader.  So unless somebody else knows of additional information, 
>>> you'd be on your own.
>>>
>>> Frankly I would just install MathType and use it in MS Word.  MathType 
>>> is usable by a blind person if you know how to read and write Latex 
>>> equations.
>>>
>>>
>>> On 1/6/2010 3:28 PM, Greg wrote:
>>>> Hello all,
>>>> I have some questions about Microsoft words equation editor:
>>>> 1.  Is it accessible?
>>>> 2.  If so is it fairly easy to use?
>>>> The reason I ask is that I am taking a college algebra class online and 
>>>> we have to use it if we do our assignments electronically instead of 
>>>> handwriting the assignment.
>>>> Thank you in advance,
>>>> Greg Wocher
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>>>
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>>
>>
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