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I learned (the basics of) LaTeX in my last year of middle school, and stuck with it ever since. To be fair, I was into computers since I was a child, played wit
by miki123211 3y ago
I learned (the basics of) LaTeX in my last year of middle school, and stuck with it ever since. To be fair, I was into computers since I was a child, played with Rockbox at the age of 10, started to dabble in programming shortly after, so this was a lot less scary than most of the things I was doing already. I took my middle and high school finals (they're kind of like SAT but matter a lot more) by producing LaTeX output, which I then compiled to PDF and printed. The test itself was in braille, as that was all that our government could do.
Throughout college, my first question to most of my professors of math subjects was "do you do LaTeX, and can you give me your source code." Most said yes, and that's how we worked. LaTeX in, LaTeX or PDF out, depending on what the professor preferred.
The amount of LaTeX you need for calculus 1 isn't that great, you could probably teach it to a relatively bright student if you had an hour or two to spare, and then give them the source files. If you have the time, I'd suggest producing "stripped" versions of your files, with as little markup as possible to get your point across and no fancy formatting unless absolutely necessary. The amount of hoops some books and papers jump through to "look nice" drives me crazy.
You could also consider producing, teaching and consuming ASCII math, which seems like an even simpler and friendlier format. I couldn't really use it much in my school career for boring technical reasons, but it looks like a promising option.
- kkylin 3y agoThanks for the suggestions! When you LaTeX your work to turn in, do you work only with the source, or do you have a good way to read the PDF output? I agree the amount of LaTeX needed for calculus is pretty minimal. One of my students was taking chemistry at the same time, which is (I think) much tougher for blind students. But they also had more teaching assistants for the course.
- miki123211 3y agoI don't interact with the PDF output myself, but I can compile and email PDFs if I need to send work over to people who do not wish to receive LaTeX themselves, a fact I used throughout most of my high-school education, where LaTeX knowledge was rare. This is why I eschew formatting where possible, I can do enough to make my symbols look right and be understandable to a sighted reader not familiar with LaTeX, but not necessarily to make things extra pretty. Not actually seeing the output makes it a lot more difficult to check your formatting work.