[BlindMath] What is your experience reading LaTeX source?

[Aqil Sajjad]

Basically, tensors are about lots of subscripts and superscripts. It 
takes a bit of time and practice to get used to them but one eventually 
gets there.

The subscripts and superscripts for the tensors in general relativity 
are often Greek letters. So in LaTex, you end up with things like 
g_{\mu\nu} or \gamma^\mu _{\nu\rho} etc.
Needless to say, if you're blind and are reading this with a screen 
reader, then parsing through it can be a bit involved. If you have some 
other format and technology that doesn't present a Greek letter as 
\alpha, \beta etc and simply expresses it as a single character and 
reads it out to you, then it can make life a lot easier. So this is 
actually a pretty good example of why reading LaTex directly isn't 
efficient and you're better off using one of the other alternatives. Add 
to these multiple greek letter indices formatting commands like
\ textstyle etc which have nothing to do with the content and you have 
more distraction on top of the fact that you have several Greek letters 
in subscripts or superscripts and that these equations can get rather long.


On 1/11/2019 3:22 PM, Łukasz Grabowski via BlindMath wrote:
> Here is an example from wikipedia's article on general relativity,which
> shows how you would write physical tensors in latex:
>   R_{\mu\nu} - {\textstyle 1 \over 2}R\,g_{\mu\nu} = {8 \pi G \over c^4}
>   T_{\mu\nu}
>
> This is copied verbatim from the source of
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity#Einstein's_equations
>
>
> On Fri, 11 Jan 2019 15:46:04 +0000
> Neil McLachlan via BlindMath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>
>> Following these comments on LaTeX with interest - some decades ago,
>> when I had useful eyes, I was very intrested in General Relativity -
>> any comments on how LaTeX deals with tensors would be appreciated.
>>
>> With thanks, Neil.
>>
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