[Tex/LaTex] How to pronounce letters generated with \Bbb and \mathbb

accessibilitybolditalicletterspronunciation

I'm writing LaTeX to speech software.

In LaTeX, I pronounce R as "Boldface Ar".

How should I pronounce $$\Bbb R$$?

Best Answer

BBB stands for blackboard bold, but "double struck" is also used (e.g. ℝ). However how it should be pronounced is another matter -- between reading out the markup ("dollar dollar backlash B B B space R") and the meaning of the symbol ("set of real numbers" is a big gap.

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[Tex/LaTex] How to boldface a section header? (including title and number)

The instruction for the font used for the number is called \@secnumfont:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\@secnumfont}{\bfseries}
\makeatother

So the complete input should be

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\patchcmd{\section}{\scshape}{\bfseries}{}{}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\@secnumfont}{\bfseries}
\makeatother

_{Never use the obsolete commands \bf (or similar two-letter ones for font changing).}

[Tex/LaTex] What research exists on Speech to LaTeX / MathML

You are taking on a REALLY hard problem that is IMHO not solvable in your context. When humans speak math, they frequently speak it ambiguously. A simple example is "b plus c over d". Even if you get 100% recognition of the tokens of the language, which is a challenge with single letter tokens, there is no way to know if this is \frac{b+c}{d} or b+\frac{c}{d}.

When computers speak math for people who are blind, they need to add somewhat unnatural delimiters in such as "fraction ... over ... end fraction" to make the speech unambiguous. Fateman's paper discusses this need and suggests one way of speaking 2D expressions. Because you probably don't want to force your speakers to speak a certain way, I suspect translating the words and leaving the listener to piece together the expression in their mind is better than trying to create the math notation in TeX or MathML and being wrong a non-trivial amount of time.

In addition to ambiguous speech, another big challenge that you will face is that there are many, many ways to speak the same notation. Some are simple variants ("loop integral" and "countour integral"). However, others have many variations and are inconsistently used even by a single speaker. As an example, someone might speak a parenthesized quantity with a pause and rate change one time, say "quantity" or "all" or some other phrase another time, or might even speak the parens (open/close) in one of several ways yet another time.

If you are willing to train your speakers to speak math in some specified way to eliminate the ambiguity and simplify the number of variations you need to deal with, then I think the problem is solvable. But even with those simplifications, it is still a really hard problem because you are going to need to drive down recognition problems with some clever context recognition that likely requires a large body of sample equations.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] How to boldface a section header? (including title and number)

[Tex/LaTex] What research exists on Speech to LaTeX / MathML

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