[Blindmath] latex beginner questions

[White, Jason J]

I'll address those of your questions that I can usefully answer.

>2. How do you deal with large tables, for e.g 8x10 cell tables? It is easy
>to navigate by column or row and edit individual cells in a wysiwyg editor
>like microsoft word. Is there a way to do this in latex, or is it not suited
>for doing frequent modifications to large tables?

This is a text editor question rather than a LaTeX question. There are various LaTeX packages for formatting complex tables, including packages that can deal with automatic wrapping of table cells.

I would suggest looking at the relevant section of the LaTeX WikiBook for an overview. How easy it is to edit and navigate table structures depends on the capabilities of your chosen text editor rather than on LaTeX.

Another possibility is to write your table in a simpler format, then "export" it to LaTeX. For example, org-mode under Emacs can do this, and it provides good table navigation features.


>3. Are there accessible editors that allow you to switch quickly between
>reading the source document and reading how the document is rendered?

In general, I don't find it useful to read "how the document is rendered". One way to do this, however, is to generate the final PDF file and then use your preferred PDF reading software to access it. However, this won't provide insight into problems in the typesetting, e.g., lines that are too long and for which you might have to provide discretionary hyphens (important in the final version of a paper, for instance). For this kind of detail, you need to look at the log file generated when LaTeX produces the PDF file from your source document.


>4. Is there a way of avoiding enclosing all mathematical expressions with $
>signs? It would be easier to read without the enclosing $ signs.

You can surround mathematical expressions with \( and \) for in-line material, or \[ and \] for displayed mathematics. In general, though, LaTeX requires mathematics to be separated from text with dollar signs or one of the other methods that I have described, for reasons of typesetting. For example, the letter x appearing in a mathematical expression is typeset in a different font from the letter x appearing in running text, and the way to distinguish textual from mathematical contexts unambiguously is to specify it explicitly in the source LaTeX file. In practice, this doesn't make the source text harder to read.

>5. How difficult would it be to use latex for generating drawings? (for the
>most part of trees and graphs).

There are packages for doing this, including specialized packages for specific diagram types. It should be easier to use these application-specific packages than the more general vector drawing packages that are available.

>6. Does anyone have any experience with lightweight markup languages like
>AsciiDoc, and how they compare with LaTeX? Its goal seems to also be to
>allow the writer to focus on the content.

I have had experience with Pandoc, which uses a special form of Markdown as its document format. The main advantage is that it can convert documents into HTML, Office Open XML (DOCX format), Open Document Format (ODF), PDF EPUB 3, etc., all from a single input file. Markdown is easy to use and leads to relatively uncluttered text files. Pandoc also supports the automatic generation of citations and bibliographies, as does LaTeX.

The disadvantage of Pandoc and Markdown compared with LaTeX is that you lose control over the details of the typesetting and layout. LaTeX is built on top of a very sophisticated publication-quality typesetting system that offers fine control over presentation. There are hundreds of packages to suit a wide range of formatting requirements and document types. Thus the entire system is much more flexible than what simpler formats such as Markdown and ASCIIDoc can support. If you want to be able to create diagrams as part of a document then LaTeX provides sophisticated packages for doing so. I don't have experience of using them, but they are readily available and well supported.


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