Hi dear AccessIndia mates? How's it going?
Let me share with you today something many of you might not be familiar with so
far.
There's a typesetting system called LATEX (pronounced as "latech"). It is
particularly suited to creation of professional looking mathematical documents.
LATEX is part of a larger system called TEX.
In order to set up this system, do the following:
Please note that this is the procedure that I follow; there are other software
for setting up TEX / LATEX.
1. Download the WinEdit text editor set from the following link.
http://www.winedt.com/download.html
Install WinEdit onto your computer. This program is free for use for up to
one month, after which it will continue to work, except that it will keep
poping up the reminder for registration. So you can remove and re-install the
program to get rid of those reminders. The latest version as of now is 10.0.
2. Download and install a program called MikeTex (pronounced "mic tech") 2.9
and install it onto your computer. Here's the link for downloading it fro free.
http://miktex.org/download
The latest version of MikeTex available as of now is 2.9.5872.
Try to leave the default options unchanged during the installation of either
program.
Once these two programs are successfully installed, open WinEdit, press Alt + D
to go to the Document menu, and then press ENTER on the New Document ... menu
item. The shortcut keystroke for these two actions is Shift + Ctrl + N.
This will open the New Document dialog box, with your focus in the list of
document type options available. Use the Up and Down arrow keys to explore the
options available here.
Now press ENTER on the following option: Latex: AMS Article.
This will open a LATEX document with the document template of the American
Mathematical Society (AMS) loaded, with the typing cursor placed in the area
for entering your desired title for the document.
For this intro, first go to the top of the file with CTRL + Home, and read
through the entire document character by character, trying to make sense of the
content of each line, until you reach the end.
Now go to the line with the following text in it.
\begin{document}
Press the Down Arrow key once, and then delete everything before the start of
the line with the following text in it.
\end{document}
Now press Alt + A to go to the Accessories menu and activate the Compile
command. Alternatively, you can also press F9 to compile your document.
Since up to this point we have not saved our document, we will be presented
with the same Save As dialog box which we're all used to in MS Word. In this
dialog, save your file by first creating a new blank folder, and then name and
save your file in that new folder.
Now place your insertion cursor in the line after the line which contains the
text, \begin{document}, press ENTER, and then type the following. JAWS users
please read character by character.
$$ \frac 1 2 + \frac 3 4 = \frac 5 4 = 1 \frac 1 4. $$
Or, write
$$ \frac{1}{2} + \frac{3}{4} = \frac{5}{4} = 1 \frac{1}{4}. $$
The double dollar signs signify the beginning and end of the mathematical
content on a line of its own.
The string "\frac" means fraction.
If either of the numerator or the denominator consists of more than one
character, then we will write
\frac{ numerator }{ denominator }
JAWS users please read these lines character by character.
Of course you would replace the word numerator with its corresponding value,
and same for the denominator.
Next, compile by pressing F9 or by pressing Alt + A followed by ENTER.
After a little while read the title of your window (for JAWS users), and you'll
notice that you are in Adobe Acrobat Reader and the fraction addition is
showing in the PDF document with the same name as the name that you've given to
your file.
This PDF is more useful for a sighted person; a blind person can go through the
original latex code and decipher whatever mathematical content is contained
therein.
For more information about LATEX, visit the following pages.
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~hildebr/tex/course/
https://www.latex-project.org/
https://www.tug.org/begin.html
You can also join the BlindMath mailing list in order to hear from other blind
mathematician. Here's the link.
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
I can share several books for free with those who are interested in learning
about this wonderful product. For that, please contact me either through e-mail
or Skype.
My Skype ID is saaqib.mahmood.
Regards.
Sincerely,
Saaqib
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