[BlindMath] New to LaTex

Mon Sep 25 23:41:43 UTC 2023

Hi Bert and others,

as I mentioned, it depends primarily on what you want to achieve.

Typst is a full-fledged typesetting system just like LaTeX, so if you're 
in a situation where you want to produce a well designed paper / book / 
whatever, Typst should serve your needs nicely.

Since in its barest form it's basically a compiler controllable from 
command line, it's as accessible as any programming language, plus, 
another advantage I find very useful is exactly the modern syntax, which 
makes it not impossible, but harder to make a mistake.

Though, having that said, it's not impossible to print markdown books, 
either.

https://thorstenball.com/blog/2018/09/04/the-tools-i-use-to-write-books/

And this is just one of many examples, there are many packages for 
writing books and articles about writing books in Markdown.

I guess rendering with LaTeX like in the example above is one option, 
but since MD works so well with HTML, I would be surprised if there 
weren't CSS based solutions.

CSS has already turned out to be quite powerful, so I would expect some 
styling magic to be possible.

While things like RMarkdown and notebooks have their unique superpowers 
in joining claims and theorems with actual real computations and 
results, providing new dymensions of reproducibility and interactivity 
to scientific documents.

It all comes down to one's needs in my opinion.

Best regards

Rastislav

Dňa 26. 9. 2023 o 1:05 Bert Van Landeghem via BlindMath napísal(a):
> Dear Rastislav,
>
> Thank you for your interesting considerations. You mention projects of
> which I never heard before.
>
> LaTeX has been a great help to me but I understand that at some point it is
> good to consider other tools. I assume that working with typst is feasible
> with screenreading software otherwise you would not suggest it, and indeed,
> the error messages from a LaTeX compiler are often very cryptic. It can
> sometimes take you an hour to find what is wrong, although I heard that the
> error messages from Overleaf are more meaningful.
>
> But what if it comes to communicating with publishers who may need to
> typeset your paper or book? Apparently it is easier to create accessible
> mathml with markdown than with LaTeX, but to what extent is markdown less
> good for typesetting than LaTeX? Would publishers accept markdown files, or
> is it easy to convert markdown to a format publishers can handle?
>
> Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.
> Bert
>
> On Mon, 25 Sept 2023 at 05:07, Rastislav Kish via BlindMath <
> blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>
>> 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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