[Emacspeak] Re: AsTeR: Spoken Math On The Emacspeak Audio Desktop

[T.V Raman <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alastair Irving via Emacspeak <emacspeak(a)emacspeak.org> writes:
Responses in-lined.

> Hi
>
> Its really great that both Aster and the Dectalk dependency are now
> available as open source.  Considering it was written in the early 90s
> Aster is remarkably ahead of its time, Windows screenreaders have only
> really started to catch up in the last few years with their support
> for MathML.

30+ years after the original development of AsTeR, I wouldn't recommend
using AsTeR outside of Emacspeak -- and especially not expect it to read
complete LaTeX files -- a few reasons why:

1. LaTeX and TeX themselves have changed a lot, and even at the time of
   writing, parsing entire files took some hand-holding.

2. The lexical analyser/scanner is built using flex, and flex scanners
   dont handle unicode/utf-8 well.
3. Given the complexity of 1,2, and the availability of Emacspeak, it's
   far more practical to hand AsTeR relevant portions of a TeX buffer.

>
> I managed to install everything and have got it to run on small
> regions of LaTeX files.  I can't get the aster-file command to read in
aster-file works modulo 1,2, so see file etc/demo.tex on which it runs
flawlessly. But also notice that that file has extraneous bits of LaTeX  stripped.
> a whole file, it either does nothing or gives an error.
>
> I did notice a parsing issue, I often write simple fractions like
> \frac 12 and aster seems to parse this as a fraction with numerator 12
Yes, the AsTeR parser expects macro arguments in braces; note that
AsTeR's goal was never to parse *every* possible LaTeX incantation. for
a simple fraction like  ½ --- write  1 \over 2 if you wish.

> and no denominator.  Correctly handling cases like this is probably
> very annoying and I suspect that if aster was to be written today the
> input format might be MathML so that parsing isn't so fiddly.
MathML doesn't have sufficient semantics, and parsing issues are in the
noise.

anyone  who is  willing to write markup as annoying as MathML
would write that fraction as well-formed markup ie \frac{1}{2}; ie to
ease parsing, write well-formed markup, whatever the shape of the
delimiters:-)

>
> Best wishes and thank you for the blogpost
>
Enjoy AsTeR.


> Alastair
>
>
> On 21/12/2022 15:22, T.V Raman via Emacspeak wrote:
>>
>>
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-- 

Thanks,

--Raman(I Search, I Find, I Misplace, I Research)
♈ Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  🦮