Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines

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.

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.

> 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).

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?

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.

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... .

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

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

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?

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/

HTML is available as a preview feature now

It's mentioned in the article.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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/