[texhax] description of text in {\tt }

[Tom Schneider]

Paul:

> >can you tell us, please, what kinds of documentation
> >would you find helpful?  quite a few readers of this
> >list are responsible for documentation, and maybe we
> >(and others in turn) can benefit from your point of view.
> 
> Hello Barbara
> Thanks for the explanation.
> 
> My favourite LaTeX documentation would contain more words describing 
> the physical effect of the commands in specific packages. I 
> appreciate that LaTeX is mainly concerned with the logical layout of 
> the document, hence its appeal to a lot of blind people, however, for 
> those of us who want to do more than typesetting articles it would be 
> amply useful to have a visual perspective of the end result in PDF or 
> DVI, the rationale being that we can then decide when and where to 
> introduce that \tt, mbox or ... command.
> This is a much more pressing problem with other more visual subsets 
> of LaTeX such as the XY package. Currently, there is no accessible 
> tool for producing mathematical drawings except XY. The only obstacle 
> to it becoming the de facto typsetting tool for blind people is the 
> lack of comprehensible tutorials with text that is independent of the 
> visual illustrations.
> I hope that gives you a clearer idea of the situation.
> Please let me know if I can contribute towards the creation of more 
> blind accessible documentation.

Interesting discussion.  Two notes:

1. Often documentation assumes that the reader already knows what the
package is for or does.  So one has to try the package to see if it
does what one is trying to do.  This can take a lot of time to no
avail.  This dovetails with Paul's comment.  Having explicit
descriptions of what each package is about (and what its effects are)
up front would really help make LaTeX much more useful.  Also, it
could reduce traffic on this group if it were well organized.

2. I've used pstricks to make drawings, that might be of some use to
you.

Tom

  Dr. Thomas D. Schneider
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Center for Cancer Research Nanobiology Program
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  toms at ncifcrf.gov
  permanent email: toms at alum.mit.edu
  http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/