[Blindmath] set notation in LaTeX

[Andrew Stacey]

(I realise that this is getting a little off-topic, but there's one thing to
reply to that may be of general interest so I'll put that first.)

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 03:38:01AM -0800, Roopakshi Pathania wrote:
> 
> > Whilst I'm on this topic, may I point out http://tex.stackexchange.com for
> > TeX/LaTeX questions.
> 
> I think the issue people face here is what question may be too unimportant
> for the forum?

On the contrary.  That site is for any users of TeX and related systems (such
as LaTeX).  Basically, we feel that there's enough of a barrier already to
people adopting some variety of TeX that we don't want to put any additional
barriers in the way of them getting help.  It's not really a forum, it's
a question-and-answer site so one can just go, ask a question, get an answer,
and not have to wade through lots of irrelevant discussions.

The one piece of advice that I would give is that if you are asking how to get
a particular symbol then you should mention that you are visually impaired (if
you are).  That is because there is a website called detexify where you can
draw a symbol and it tells you how to get it in LaTeX (or its best guesses).
I have no idea how accessible that site is, but I would guess that it is
difficult at the very least for someone who can't see very well.  Questions of
the form "How do I get this symbol" on the site tex.stackexchange.com tend to
get answers of the form "Have you tried detexify?" (if you think about it,
that's the most useful answer - along the lines of "tell a man a symbol and
you fix one document, tell a man about detexify and you fix all his
documents").  So if detexify isn't going to help, it's best to say so at the
outset.

Okay, everyone else can stop reading now ...

> Thanks for correcting me. But I did say that \subset is a cup turned to the
> right side, which in my hurried explanation meant that the cup's open
> "mouth" is to the right side.  Of course you are right about the \subseteq
> symbol.

My apologies for the inference.  I was not correcting your description of the
symbol.  My intention in describing it again was to make my answer
self-contained since it seemed that your answer (and thus by extension mine)
were pitched at the level where someone might not know these symbols all that
well.

Andrew Stacey