I am trying to help a philosophy professor convert an OER book on logic that was written completely in latex into pressbooks so we can have a responsive web version, and its more easily remixed and adopted.
Things were going ok until we got to the section on truth tables. There are tables upon tables in the books, where the formatting really matters for the content and for clarity. An example screenshot is shared below:
I was trying to explore other options, and I went to tablesgenerator.com to try to use it’s latex generator to create a table which I had a little more control over the styling. Unfortunately I get an error that the “Formula does not parse.” I’m successfully using latex for the logical notation, so I am comfortable with the open and close tags, looking up basics, but I’m not comfortable enough to create a whole table.
Anyone have any suggestions on what I could try next or where to go for help? And also what I can do to make these tables a little more accessible? I am already captioning them and defining table headers, but I can’t help but think that it would be terrible for someone to try to get through without inspecting visually.
Hi Ed - LaTeX tables aren’t supported by the default PB LaTeX handling, which could be why you’re getting the error message (not user error!). I believe QuickLaTeX does support them, but the tables produced are not accessible, so that’s not an ideal solution. If you haven’t seen it, BCcampus’ Accessibility Toolkit has some good advice on creating accessible tables (and a bunch of other stuff).
Thank you for the people on this thread that tried to help. In the end, I created complex tables, with table headers and scope defined.
It was a challenge for me, because truth tables are a defined thing in logic, and there is sort of a standard format. Although I might have been able to make them slightly more accessible by having defined rows and also defining the scope of the rows, that is changing the content to make it more accessible. In the end the most complicated of my tables end up looking like this.
Part of what makes me ok with all of this, is the text both immediately before and after the table is a detailed description of what is being represented and how to interpret it.
I see that pressbooks has on its roadmap to incorporate better table editors. I really appreciate the details for the individual sprints and the longterm goals. Thanks everyone!
