Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines

https://richardzach.org/2025/03/accessible-open-textbooks-in-math-heavy-disciplines/

by volemo • 1 year ago

235 75 1 year ago

nextos3• 1 year ago

Richard Zach et al. logic textbooks are a work of art: https://slc.openlogicproject.org.

Aside, I'd be happy to pay for great classic math textbooks in a well typeset edition.

Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces is one such example. The text is fantastic, but everything is too cramped and hard to read compared to a modern book from the 1970s onward.

A newer edition typeset in LaTeX would be great.

TimorousBestie2• 1 year ago

By my estimation, it’ll hit the public domain in 2053. Not that long of a wait, and in any case math typesetting should be much improved by then.

nextos3• 1 year ago

2053 is pretty far. I wish Dover, who hold publication rights, improved typesetting of this and a few other classic textbooks.

It's probably not hard to use an LLM to do the bulk of the conversion to TeX work cheaply, and then some human input to polish the final document and fix errors.

JadeNB4• 1 year ago

There was a project a while ago to do exactly this (in general, not for Halmos's book specifically. I assume that's the one you mean). I can't find it by Googling, but here's an Internet Archive capture of a Project Gutenberg page that collected books for which this had been done: https://web.archive.org/web/20120502091427/https://www.guten... .

whyho• 1 year ago

Typst( https://typst.app/) Is good Latex alternative which should be mentioned here. Their roadmap also features html as a target.

zellyn• 1 year ago

HTML is available as a preview feature now

AugustinWinther• 1 year ago

Switched from LaTeX to Typst two years ago and have never looked back. Looking forward to their HTML export feature.

Looks like you can already play with it (though it's still "very incomplete") https://typst.app/docs/reference/html/

japanuspus• 1 year ago

A friendly person on the internet already put up the typst-to-mathml part of this [0]. I have been considering the ultimate yak-shave of building a static site generator around this...

[0] https://github.com/wcshds/typst-math-to-mathml-converter

teleforce• 1 year ago

Another is TeXmacs [1].

"Despite its name, TeXmacs is not a front-end to TeX or LaTeX.[mHowever, TeXmacs documents can be converted to either TeX or LaTeX. LaTeX also can be imported (to some extent), and both import from and export to HTML, Scheme, Verbatim, and XML is provided; the HTML export is stylable with CSS (since version 1.99.14). There is a converter for MathML as well, and TeXmacs can output PDF and PostScript for printing."

[2] GNU TeXmacs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_TeXmacs

IshKebab• 1 year ago

Yeah they really need to rebrand.

TimorousBestie2• 1 year ago

If only it weren’t subscription model. At least I can still install LaTeX without a credit card.

raegis2• 1 year ago

Typst is Apache licensed. I install it with "cargo install --locked typst-cli". The subscription model is for their web interface with storage. I write simple worksheets for a living, so I've been using it instead of TeX lately. (I've use LaTeX or plain TeX since around 1990.)

jenny91• 1 year ago

That "LaTeX alternative" looks awful? `integral_t^oo` in place of `\integral_t^\infty`?

Why would anyone switch from LaTeX to this other than the speed?

wanderlust123• 1 year ago

Its a lot easier and idiomatic to write. I would try it first before knocking it off.

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

It is only kind of true, PDF does everything that HTML does, with print quality, naturally one needs Adobe proper for the full feature set, as most readers only implement the standard partially, for various reasons.

xworld217• 1 year ago

The accessibility and reflowability of HTML content, not to mention the ability to customize color schemes, fonts, line spacing, and similar are not possible with PDF, even using Adobe software. Even using the latest PDF 2.0 standard, you are ultimately expected to convert it to HTML if you need all that flexibility (such as via https://ngpdf.com/).

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

I feel we are splitting airs here, and there is the whole FOSS versus Adobe thingie,

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...

Finnucane• 1 year ago

Getting PDF up to WCAG standards is a painful and arduous task.

kepano• 1 year ago

Another LaTeX to MathML option that I have had a good experience with is temml — it works in the browser or server side with Node.js. https://temml.org/

lutusp2• 1 year ago

At my age I find this issue annoyingly predictable -- it suggests replacing LaTeX with something more modern and/or flexible. But that was the original idea behind LaTeX -- to replace what preceded it, create a portable comunication medium for mathematical expressions.

Not to discourage experimentation, but I would like to see some behavoral reserve and healthy skepticism before adding another layer to the mathematical expression enterprise. There's also this issue to consider: https://xkcd.com/927/ .

xworld217• 1 year ago

I agree, and the article talks about working with LaTeX and converting directly to HTML. This is more about replacing the final PDF with HTML.

eviks2• 1 year ago

But you're discouraging experimentation with nothing else but a reference to a silly comic

lutusp2• 1 year ago

The annoying comic would be silly if it weren't true. The point of the comic is the fact it alludes to, which by magnitude transcends any specific reference.

dreghgh• 1 year ago

What LaTeX replaced was:

a) typing the text of math papers and writing in the formulae by hand.

b) word processing which was fixed width and line based, where there would be three characters for 'top of an integral sign', middle and bottom, and you would have to align your three characters at the same horizontal point on three successive lines to make the integral sign, and also position all subscripts, exponents yourself.

The fact that LaTeX had an important mission and was successful in it doesn't mean that another thing is not needed now. Things have moved on. Replacing things which solved a problem doesn't mean going back to the situation before they existed.

oh_my_goodness4• 1 year ago

Uh ... where is it written that LaTeX can only provide pdf output?

Turn that around. Thought experiment. Say we work like pigdogs for 5 years and we completely replace all of Latex except the part that produces pdf. What value have we provided to users at that point?

xworld217• 1 year ago

The article talks about converting LaTeX to HTML, which is feasible today, if only buggy and fragile. This is the textbook the author talks about, which is written in LaTeX (but compiled with LaTeXML instead of pdflatex): https://forallx.openlogicproject.org/html/

oh_my_goodness4• 1 year ago

It does. But why can't LaTex produce png or something? Why does it have to be either pdf or pretty much abandon the idea of typesetting? Or am I misunderstanding?

troymc• 1 year ago

My current favorite option is Quarto [1]. It's basically a friendly wrapper around Pandoc [2], letting you write in Markdown (+ lots of Quarto-specific extensions) and render to LaTeX, Typst, multi-page HTML, EPUB, docx, and more.

[1] https://quarto.org/

[2] https://pandoc.org/

scottyeager• 1 year ago

It's mentioned in the article.

miki123211• 1 year ago

Switch the language on foreign terms and names so that screen readers can pronounce them in the right voice.

Screen reader user here. Don't actually do this, this is bad advice.

Just like a lecturer won't suddenly switch to a German accent when saying words like "schadenfreude" or names like "Friedrich Nietzsche", neither should a screen reader. Having your voice constantly change under you for no apparent reason is distracting more than anything else.

What you should do this for are longer pieces of text in a foreign language, like a multi-paragraph piece of text to analyze in a foreign language textbook.

TrayKnots2• 1 year ago

Yea, I hate that. Words are pronounced differently in foreign languages. Do we say Moscow or Moskwa? Do we say ka-tana or ka-ta-na? If Freud is not spoken with the typical Gemran diphthong, then suddenly someone comes along and corrects you. I do speak German, I know how Freud is pronounced and I will pronounce it as it should be pronounced when speaking German, but when speaking English, it is Frood for me.

So, I am with you. We shouldn't learn the pronunciation of 200 different languages. If Kirchhoff's laws sound like Captain Kirk, who the fuck cares. Different languages pronounce stuff differently.

currymj• 1 year ago

i agree with you in spirit (I pronounce Paris as Paris).

however I have never heard of someone pronouncing Freud as Frood, outside of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sobc2WhL16c

thaumasiotes2• 1 year ago

I do speak German, I know how Freud is pronounced and I will pronounce it as it should be pronounced when speaking German, but when speaking English, it is Frood for me.

That... isn't the normal English pronunciation. The English pronunciation would rhyme with "joyed", if "joy" were a verb.

/'sɪg.mənd fɹɔɪd/

There are some other big names where the same vowel sequence isn't recognized: Euler (usually pronounced with /ɔɪ/) and von Neumann (not so much).

Euler suffers from beginning with the "eu", which makes it look more Greek.

aleph_minus_one• 1 year ago

Do we say Moscow or Moskwa?

Russian friends taught me that there is no "o" (as the letter is pronounced in Spanish or German) to pronounce in Москва since the о is unstressed. Rather pronounce it as "Maskwa" ("a" letter as in Spanish or German). :-)

xworld217• 1 year ago

Just like a lecturer won't suddenly switch to a German accent when saying words like "schadenfreude" or names like "Friedrich Nietzsche"

Is there a middle ground? Whenever I check my content with a screen reader, uncommon foreign names are often mispronounced in ways that are sometimes almost irrecognisable. Even my name comes out wrong, although it would be understandable (typically, the stress ends up on the wrong syllable).

mwcampbell• 1 year ago

A lecturer who is fluently multilingual might indeed smoothly switch accents when pronouncing foreign words. But it's still the same voice, and (if they're well practiced at it) they don't have to pause in mid-sentence to switch languages, as text-to-speech systems usually do. And eSpeak can switch languages while still being the same voice, since it's a rule-based, parametric synthesizer. But, at least with NVDA, a mid-sentence HTML span with a different lang attribute still causes a (short) break in the intonation on either side. That's too bad, because a multilingual parametric synthesizer like eSpeak could be like the ultimate polyglot speaker, impressing us all with how smoothly it switches languages.

mpascale00• 1 year ago

Out of curiosity, are there models for speech synthesis which generate speech parametrically and then refine neurally?

amadeuspagel• 1 year ago

What would it mean to say a german word with a german accent? I thought a german accent is when you pronounce english words as if they're german?

westurner• 1 year ago

"BookML: automated LaTeX to bookdown-style HTML and SCORM, powered by LaTeXML" https://vlmantova.github.io/bookml/

LaTeXML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeXML :

LaTeXML emits XML from a parsing of LaTex with Perl.

SCORM is a standard for educational content in ZIP packages which is supported by Moodle, ILIAS, Sakai, Canvas, and a number of other LMS Learning Management Systems.

SCORM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Refere...

xAPI (aka Experience API, aka TinCan API) is a successor spec to SCORM for event messages to LRS Learning Record Stores. Like SCORM, xAPI was granted by ADL.

re: xAPI, schema.org/Action, and JSON-LD: https://github.com/RusticiSoftware/TinCanSchema/issues/7

schema.org/Action describes potential actions: https://schema.org/docs/actions.html

For example, from the Schema.org "Potential Actions" doc: https://schema.org/docs/actions.html :

   {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "Movie",
    "name": "Footloose",
    "potentialAction": {
      "@type": "WatchAction"
    }
  }

That could be a syllabus.

ActionTypes include: BuyAction, AssessAction > ReviewAction,

Schema.org > "Full schema hierarchy" > [Open hierarchy] > Action and rdfs:subClassOf subclasses thereof: https://schema.org/docs/full.html

What Linked Data should [math textbook] publishing software include when generating HTML for the web?

https://schema.org/CreativeWork > Book, Audiobook, Article > ScholarlyArticle, Guide, HowTo, Blog, MathSolver

The schema.org Thing > CreativeWork LearningResource RDFS class has the :assesses, :competencyRequired, :educationalLevel, :educationalAlignment, and :teaches RDFS properties; https://schema.org/LearningResource

You can add bibliographic metadata and curricular Linked Data to [OER LearningResource] HTML with schema.org classes and properties as JSON-LD, RDFa, or Microdata.

The schema.org/about property has a domain which includes CreativeWork and a range which includes Thing, so a :CreativeWork is :about a :Thing which could be a subclass of :CreativeWork.

I work with MathJax and LaTeX in notebooks a bit, and have generated LaTeX and then PDF with Sphinx and texlive like the ReadTheDocs docker container which already has the multiple necessary GB of LaTeX installed to render a README.rst as PDF without pandoc:

The Jupyter Book docs now describe how that works.

Jupyter Book docs > Customize LaTeX via Sphinx: https://jupyterbook.org/en/stable/advanced/pdf.html#customiz...

How to build the docs with the readthedocs docker image onesself: https://github.com/jupyter-book/jupyter-book/issues/991

ReadTheDocs > Dev > Design > Build Images > Time required to install languages at build time [with different package managers with varying performance] https://docs.readthedocs.com/dev/latest/design/build-images....

The jupyter-docker-stacks, binderhub, and condaforge/miniforge3 images build with micromamba now IIRC.

condaforge/miniforge3: https://hub.docker.com/r/condaforge/miniforge3

Recently, I've gotten into .devcontainers/devcontainers.json; which allows use of one's own Dockerfile or a preexisting docker image and installs LSP and vscode on top, and then runs the onCreateCommand, postStartCommand

A number of tools support devcontainer.json: https://containers.dev/supporting

Devcontainers could be useful for open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines; so that others can work within, rebuild, and upgrade the same container env used to build the textbook.

Re: MathJax, LaTeX, and notebooks:

To left-align a LaTeX expression in a (Jupyter,Colab,VScode,) notebook wrap the expression with single dollar signs. To center-align a LaTeX expression in a notebook, wrap it with double dollar signs:

  $ \alpha_{\beta_1} $
  $$ \alpha_{\beta_2} $$

Textbooks, though? Interactive is what they want.

How can we make textbooks interactive?

It used to be that textbooks were to be copied down from; copy by hand from the textbook.

To engage and entertain this generation.

ManimCE, scriptable 3d simulators with test assertions, Thebelab,

Jupyter Book docs > "Launch into interactive computing interfaces" > BinderHub ( https://mybinder.org ), JupyterHub, Colab, Deepnote: https://jupyterbook.org/en/stable/interactive/launchbuttons....

JupyterLite-xeus builds a jupyterlite static site from an environment.yml; such that e.g. the xeus-python kernel and other packages are compiled to WebAssembly (WASM) so that you can run Jupyter notebooks in a browser without a server:

repo2jupyterlite works like repo2docker, which powers BinderHub, which generates a container with a current version of Jupyter installed after building the container according to one or more software dependency requirement specification files in /.binder or the root of the repo.

repo2jupyter: https://github.com/jupyterlite/repo2jupyterlite

jupyterlite-xeus: https://jupyterlite-xeus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

somethingsome2• 1 year ago

I think the neatest feature would be: the mathematician states the theorem in English (edit: with math symbols as needed), then he states the proof in English.

A post-Processor transform the proof into lean (with any official lib loaded). It is automatically verified. If something is missing, the post processor ask to write in English the missing parts. Iterate like this.

The lean proof is hidden in the final document, and can be displayed if needed. Or even, we get an English version that can be easily retransformed into lean at will.

Bonus point: we can query the document to give more details on part of the proof and it outputs (expanded) lean formatted as nice English.

Note: there is no need to have all the math self contained in the document, he can say to assume some theorem true to do his proof. And this would be reflected in English.

volemo2• 1 year ago

I can’t speak for true mathematicians, but as a (mostly theoretical) physicist I would hate to write my maths in plain English. Notation is used precisely because it’s easier, more efficient (to write and to read) to use it instead of prose. If you’d like an example, I suggest reading texts on solving quadratic equations that predate modern algebraic notation.

somethingsome2• 1 year ago

Sorry I meant English with maths inside, not to avoid all symbols! (A classical style proof that you find in any current paper) Edited.

nicf• 1 year ago

For the articles on my website, I have a pretty janky workflow where I write a LaTeX document that I compile both to a PDF and (using Pandoc) to HTML, which I render with KaTeX. I've been in the market for a while for something that's less fragile but which can still produce both a PDF and visually appealing HTML output starting from a LaTeX source, and it seems like some of the ideas listed here might be what I want! Thanks for the link. (That said, if anyone has a particular recommendation, I'd love to hear it!)

ohgr• 1 year ago

I’m lazy. I just extract the abstract from the tex source and put a link to the PDF. That is however quite different and not public in my case.

Turns out from a technical documentation consumer perspective it’s easier to save a PDF than feck around with web pages and try and save them.

nprateem• 1 year ago

Why do maths textbooks never explain how to read the equations? I've tried reading a few and before you know it there'll be some matrix stuff in, integrations or whatever and no explanation of how to read them in normal English like a maths teacher does.

They all seem to assume you're still at school rather than it being decades since you last had to read them. Even using Greek symbols - WRITE THEM OUT. Jeez, it's so elitist.

volemo2• 1 year ago

Try reading physics books that introduce the maths as an instrument (e.g. Wald’s General relativity to learn tensor calculus, you only need the first few chapters), they usually explain concepts and notation in simpler terms. However, they may hide stuff under the rug of “it’s a tradition”, “we do this, don’t ask questions”, “ margin is too narrow to contain the proof”, etc.

P.S.: Greek alphabet is not that bad (it’s only 24 letters, and a third of them isn’t used on behalf of being the same as some Latin ones), just look it up. It’s much worse when some mathematician in the 19th century invents his own squiggly to refer to a pretty useful function.

tekla• 1 year ago

If you don't know how to read them, you aren't ready to understand them. The writers expect you to have a base level of knowledge.

snitzr• 1 year ago

Accessibility is win-win because it helps more people access information and also has content creators thinking clearly about the quality of code and presentation.

wosined• 1 year ago

The obligatory TeXmacs mention.

throwaway81523• 1 year ago

I feel like there are enough free and semi-free textbooks to study just about anything I want. The limiting factor is my not so plentiful brainpower to actually learn new math stuff. There's no way I can possibly run out of textbooks.

Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines

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