[BlindMath] New to LaTex

[Rastislav Kish]

Hi,

LaTeX is a typesetting system. You write a document using a plain-text 
language, and get a stylyzed output according to what you've coded. And 
yes, math content is supporrted.


It's a widely used tool in the academic writing, so if you want to learn 
more and try it out, there are tons of books, tutorials and other 
resources for doing so.


Regarding personal and subjective experience, personally, I absolutely 
hate LaTeX. Yes, it was a big thing back in the 20th century (TeX was 
released in 1978). But, for some context, this was the era when it was 
common for people to write computer programs in machine code, C 
programming language was a fresh novelty, and printing a document was 
among the computers' top capabilities.


In these wild conditions, yes, LaTeX truly was an outstanding and 
exceptional, visionary project.


However, 40 years have passed, in computer science, that's an eternity. 
Everything has so much drastically evolved - computers, cpus, 
programming languages, paradigms, backing technologies, just... everything.


Therefore, for the eye of a modern computer user/developer, LaTeX is a 
very messy, ugly, awkward, inconvenient language that just doesn't fit 
into the set of modern shiny advanced tools we have and are used to today.


However, given all the development laTeX received due to its enormous 
popularity, it has been a very difficult task to create a full-fledged 
modern competitor that could challenge everything LaTeX can offer.


But, there are definitely very interesting projects, with interesting 
results.

My favourite is Typst:

https://typst.app/


The syntax is just beautiful, compiler is blazingly fast, the used tech 
stack very modern and generally, I love it.


And, there are other tools, depending on one's particular use-case. If 
you're not after typesetting but just formatting, Markdown is becoming 
more and more popular in science and particularly the data science, 
often combined with code blocks in various programming languages (see 
RMarkdown, Jupyter notebooks etc.)


Asciimath is great for very readable math notation, there are plenty of 
diagraming tools like d2 or plantuml, and, if there's a need to join the 
toolchain together, there are preprocessors available that can do the work.


So, there is myriad of tools these days. I'm always trying to pick up 
the nicest and most convenient-ones to get the job done.


Best regards


Rastislav


Dňa 21. 9. 2023 o 23:37 Dana Ibrahim via BlindMath napísal(a):
> Hello all,
>
> I hope everyone is doing great.
>
> I recently heard about the concept of LaTex, but I want to learn more about
> it.
>  From what I've heard, you can type math symbols using letters. For example,
> typing a fraction would mean that one would type "frac."
>
> I also heard that one can compile these LaTex files into a PDF file, but I
> also know that math PDFs are terrible with screen-readers.
>
> So, what are your experiences with LaTex? How do you read it? What are the
> most accessible applications one can use?
>
> Sorry for the long email.
>
> Best,
> Dana
>
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