[BlindMath] LaTex compiler

Fri Apr 17 11:40:48 UTC 2020

There are two choices to make: a TeX distribution, and a text editor.

For the TeX distribution, I personally prefer TeX Live:
https://www.tug.org/texlive/
which is available for Linux, Mac OS and Windows. The 2020 version has just been released. It can easily be installed under Linux with a package manager. (Details differ depending on the Linux distribution.) Under Mac OS, you can install MacTeX, which includes TeX Live. The Windows installation is a little awkward, because the graphical interface of the TeX Live installer is not accessible with a screen reader. However, you can work around this by running the Windows installer, selecting the “extract only” option, and extracting everything to a directory. Then, in Windows PowerShell,change to that directory to which you’ve extracted the files, and run installer manually. Use the “-gui text” option so that it will present a textual user interface rather than the inaccessible graphical one. If I remember correctly, the command is
install-tl -gui text

I also used MikTeX under Windows for a while, but I encountered problems with it (regrettably, I can’t remember what those were), and switched to TeX Live instead. Another advantage of TeX Live is that it really is the same under Linux, Mac OS and Windows – excellent for those of us who have multiple operating systems.

The choice of a text editor is very much a matter of individual preference. People disagree strongly about which text editor is best, and the topic can easily turn into a lengthy debate. I’ll declare my bias: I’m a real Emacs enthusiast, and I’ve used AucTeX mode under Emacs extensively for writing LaTeX documents. In my personal opinion, Emacs and Vim are the best text editors available, and everything else is downhill from there.

Emacs is best under Linux, but it is also reasonably accessible under Windows (probably better with a braille display than with speech only, as a screen reader won’t automatically respond when you navigate word by word in the editor, for example). Also, T.V. Raman’s Emacspeak software is excellent – again, best used under Linux, although I think it can be run on a Mac as well. It provides a highly customized speech interface for Emacs that is better than a screen reader.

Vim is another great text editor. It’s available for every operating system. The Linux screen readers would handle it better than the Mac or Windows ones, though.

Turning to everything else: for the Mac, TextMate seems to be reasonably good option. For Windows, Notepad++ is a reasonable editor, and there is screen reader support for it in NVDA and JAWS. Another editor worth watching is Visual Studio Code. When I last tried it, I encountered some accessibility issues, but developers at Microsoft are working to improve its accessibility. There’s a LaTeX extension for it, too. It’s open-source, so it may become well established in the development community. The truly excellent text editors tend to remain in active use and development for a long time, so if you choose a good one, you can invest time in learning it, and then use it for decades – perhaps even for the rest of your career, if you so choose.

My advice would be to investigate the options carefully, read some documentation, try out the editors that interest you, and choose what you think is best.

From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org>
Date: Friday, April 17, 2020 at 01:42
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics' <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Aqil Sajjad <aqilsajjad at gmail.com>
Subject: [BlindMath] LaTex compiler
I need to install a LaTex compiler on a new computer and was wondering if
there's a good free of cost option out there that is reasonably accessible?
In the past, I have used win-edit and have been really happy with it, but
it's a paid software.

Aqil

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