[nfbcs] latex benefits

[Greg Kearney]

TeX and LATex have been around since the late 1960's it was well developed when I was using it in the mid to late 1970's.

A funny story. When I wrote my thesis in college I had a professor who was a bit of a crank. He was known for telling students that they needed to resubmit their work with the citations done in what ever style they had not used. This being the days of typewriters this would cause a near panic.

Using TeX I printed out my thesis in every citation style I could think of. I put all the copies into my bag and went off for my review. The old coot looked it over and then decided I needed my citations in some other form or another. I reached into my bag and handed him the whole thesis done in that citation style and informed him I had it all in a dozen other citation styles if he cared to have a look at them.

I'm sure he thought I must have spent forever typing up all these copies when all I really did was change one line of code at the start of the document and tell TeX to reprocess the file over and over again.

Greg

> On Jan 24, 2017, at 5:59 PM, Doug Lee via nfbcs <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> 1970's? Wow! I learned about it in the late 80's and loved it; used it for college coursework and got some profs that used it to send me homeworks in LaTeX files instead of hard copy or images. PicTeX was hard to use then
> because of how much memory it required, but I may have used that module a time or two to generate graphs and such. I think I stopped using LaTeX soon after the conversion from \documentstyle to \documentclass though, so I'm
> sure there's a lot I'd have to relearn were I to have occasion to use it again. Still, when I updated a four-year-old Cygwin installation earlier this week, I consciously made sure to include TeX/LaTeX in the set of installed
> packages.
> 
> On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 05:42:32PM -0600, NFBCS mailing list wrote:
> LaTex is a complex document processing and typesetting application that is uniquely suited for blind users in my opinion. While the learning curve is steep the results you will get out of LaTex and it's parent TeX are without equal in quality.
> 
> It is perfectly possible to generate database diagrams, math expression or even music scores in LaTeX/TeX. There are addin modules to do all that and more. IT is suited for blind users because it is a code based system in which one composes the work in a text editor and then processes the code to generate the PDF typeset file.
> 
> I have used LaTex since the 1970's and it has never failed me yet. HArd to learn but well worth the effort.
> 
> Greg Kearney
>> On Jan 24, 2017, at 3:32 PM, Andy B. via nfbcs <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Someone recommended that I should start using latex. Is this true, and if
>> so, what are the benefits?
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> -- 
> Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                http://www.dlee.org
> SSB BART Group           doug.lee at ssbbartgroup.com   http://www.ssbbartgroup.com
> "If you refuse to be made straight when you are green,
> you will not be made straight when you are dry." {African}
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