[Blindmath] to read laTex

[Michael Whapples]

Yes your example is sort of what I was getting at (well at least on a small scale). The impact on reading comes when you start scaling that up, I have had equations which start like {{\frac{{x{… and you can imagine how tracking where you are and what the meaning of any closing brace is can be quite difficult.

Michael Whapples
On 28 Nov 2011, at 19:17, Andrew Stacey wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 05:27:53PM +0000, Michael Whapples wrote:
>> I possibly would say that it would be wrong for MathType to simplify the
>> equations more. My reasoning is that the LaTeX mode of MathType is also for
>> input and removing some of those braces could actually lead to a different
>> visual appearance of the equation.
>> 
>> Its this reason of what happens when the equation is recompiled that I say
>> LaTeX is really a good authoring system but not a reading system IE. what
>> gives good output visually when compiled is not necessarily good for reading
>> and vice versa.
> 
> As an example, the code "x {=} y" and "x = y" display differently when
> compiled to PDF but I would imagine that for reading the mathematics then the
> difference is pretty minimal.
> 
> (Quoted originally from Ben)
> 
>>> I have in fact written such a Perl script to do this for Mathtype to Latex
>>> conversions produced by my own Math professor.  But the pattern matching
>>> gets pretty difficult when extraneous curly braces are inserted here and
>>> there.  One almost needs a gramatical parser to simplify the expressions
>>> and THEN do a translation.
> 
> I've written a few scripts and the like for manipulating TeX documents.  My
> first ones were largely pattern based but I eventually realised that this
> didn't work and I ended up writing an implementation of TeX's "mouth" and
> "stomach" in Perl.  Even that wasn't great, so I took literally the statement
> that "the only thing that understands TeX is tex itself" and wrote a class
> that converts a LaTeX document to some other format.  As it works in tex
> itself then it can understand true LaTeX syntax, including all those
> horrendous braces.  I've not mentioned it before on this list because I don't
> know what output format would be appropriate for the readers here, and it is
> very much in alpha/beta (though I use it for writing all my documents that end
> up on webpages now so it's definitely usable).  I only mention it now because
> of the above about Perl scripts and so I want to save anyone the pain I went
> through on that route!  Anyone interested or intrigued is welcome to contact
> me off-list.
> 
> Andrew
> 
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