About the LaTeX Typing Tutor

Here we look at what makes the LaTeX Typing Tutor works, and future plans.

User experience

I'm an expert. Not a typical user. I'd really like feedback, and personal experience, from people who are learning LaTeX. And the less they know about LaTeX to begin with, the better!

Content

The typing tutor is a platform for the delivery of training content. Under the hood, it has a list of examples.

For example:

2 + 2 = 4
2 \times 3 = 6
\frac{1}{3} + \frac{1}{6} = \frac{1}{2}
3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 = 4 \times 5 / 2
1 + 2 + \cdots + 99 + 100 = 100 \times 101 / 2 = 5050

And for a more advanced audience

a^2 + b^2 = c^2
x^3 + y^3 \neq z^3
\int_{x=0}^1 x^2 \, dx= \frac{1}{3}
F_{n} = F_{n-2} + F_{n-1}

The creation of a large collection of useful examples will be a great encouragment, to the development of the platform.

Technology

All the heavy lifting is done by MathJax. It's a LaTeX compatible mathematics display system that works in your browser. It provides the instant preview of what you type, when you use the LaTeX typing tutor.

The rest is very slight. Just a few lines of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Once MathJax is available and understood, further technology development of the typing tutor is mainly a matter of UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) design, together with Front End Web development.

The development of the platform will be a great encouragement, to the creation of useful examples. And to help us present examples appropriate to the user.

Contribute

This is an open source project, on Gitub. We hope you like it, and want to contribute your special skills, be they as a user, educator, developer or subject matter expert.

If you've got an account on Github, you can report a problem, make suggestion, offer to help on the LaTeX Typing Tutor issue tracker.

Otherwise, you might want to contact me directly. Anyone who wants to can make a useful contribution.