Logic [ed: Benjamin Martin]

Here are some further issues we have run into with the Logic book, which I have been discussing with the book editor @benjamin.martin and with @apurva, and which I’d like to move here just in case others can learn from them.

And Apurva and Benjamin, if you have thoughts on any of these, please do reply!

  1. There are a few diagrams in one of the chapters, and the exercise solutions, that aren’t rendering well. See this screenshot for an example:

I was hoping we could do these in LaTeX but doing so with TikZ doesn’t work with MathJax, according to a discussion thread about logical symbols and accessibility.. We’re still working on that. It might be that we end up creating svg files and using alternative text to make the images accessible.

  1. I am trying to figure out how best to render the arguments in standard form (with numbered premises and conclusions with a line between the premises and conclusion). In the google docs versions of the chapters we had them just as numbered text on different lines, with the last premise before the conclusion underlined to represent the line between the premises and conclusion. I think it’s more accessible (and it looks better) to have them be ordered lists with a horizontal line between using <hr> (I had to style the <hr> element using CSS to make it look right, which meant 1em left indent and also I’m playing with the width (30%, 40%, etc.). But to do this I have to end the ordered list before the horizontal line, and then start a new ordered list starting at a new number (e.g., if there are two premises, the conclusion is rendered with a new ordered list starting at number 3).

I don’t know how accessible it is to have one ordered list and then a new one starting at a new number after a horizontal line. Will that indicate that the three things are part of one, single argument?

  1. In chapter 3 there are a few places where there are two sets of arguments with premises & conclusions side by side on a page, which is rendered using padding and then spaces or tabs I think. This seems like it might not work so well on all exports and might look strange on some browsers or sizes of windows. See the screen shot below:

I am not sure how best to do this sort of thing so that it is both accessible and renders well in all formats. I doubt a table would work well because the information is not really table-like (I’d have to add row and column headers and that doesn’t really fit here I think). We may just have to move these to be one after the other, vertically.