Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

In response to:

> the learning curve to access that power is almost impenetrable

One of my pet cliches is: "Everything is easy, when you know how to do it."

Overleaf provides a gentle introduction to LaTeX.

Lyx has very good inline live preview support for Math. It's just 'compiling' the math snippet itself (with whatever environments/packages the doc is using) so it's near instant.

I'm a big fan of Lyx as a great accessible and fairly user-friendly UI for writing documents to eventually typeset with LaTeX. I've used it for my own dissertation and it made writing so much easier. It's also customisable. I ended up making a few of my own definitions for things, with their own menu entries - which was just a matter of adding some UI definition files.

My father went to uni after retirement and (eventually) got a masters. He used to have endless issues with his masters dissertation in MS Word, with the format going screw and *especially* the required citations being very hard to manage and constantly getting messed up. I was constantly having to go over to him to try help him with his MS Word processing issues. In the end, I switched him over to Lyx. Showed him how to make chapters, sections and sub-sections, and insert citations. Told him just to write, and that the formatting would largely take care of itself. I helped with proofing at the end and help with inserting figures and illustrations, but it saved *both of us* a lot of hair-pulling and time.

My dad generally does not get on with computers. He gets very frustrated with complex programmes, with states affecting things he can't see/understand. He became a big of fan Lyx however, for the way it just let him write and generally staying out of the way, while keeping track of all the citations and layout for him, and producing a beautiful doc at the end thanks to LaTeX.

Lyx is a _great_ bit of software!

Using overleaf has a unique advantage when you have a group of collaborators that use different OSs and have installed LaTeX using different approaches (e.g. one on Windows with MikTeX, another one on Linux with TeXLive, another one on Linux with distribution provided packages). It gives you a platforms that can be used as a reference: if the doc compiles fine there and it does not compile fine for a subset of the collaborators, it is easy to convince them that the issue is on their side.

A pain point is that the free tier is insufficient even for the simplest document with the LuaLaTeX engine.