Graphics, Figures & Tables ⇒ LaTeX for a Fractions Textbook?

[LaTexLearner]

Hi!

I'm on a personal mission to eradicate fraction phobia. I've been making some user-friendly worksheets in MS Word to do so, but that has become a nightmare.

Perhaps it's time for me to learn LaTex? I have no experience in coding and am generally not a "techie" person.

To realize my vision for a user-friendly textbook on fractions, I'll need to make documents that look like this (click or scroll to see the lower part as well):

example.png (121.38 KiB) Viewed 4494 times

Please note the seemingly hand-written example and the spaces for students to write answers.

How easy or hard is this to do in LaTeX?

Or would you recommend I use some other tool? What do elementary school math textbook makers normally use to make their materials?

Thanks in advance!

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Welcome to the forum!

It is really beneficial to learn LaTeX, as you write math text. It's not totally easy, but manageable. Thousands or millions of students did it. I could recommend the LaTeX Beginner's Guide which I wrote. Packt Publishing distributes it. You could get it as ebook and kindle version as well. There are more books around, books just have the advantage over some Internet text that they are usually comprehensive, consistent, verified. But you could have a look at Free LaTeX documentation as well. Texts on the Internet are just sometimes not the newest, could be some years but you also find documents with 20 years of age.

To the main question: it's not so difficult. LaTeX is well suited for it. I would made the drawings with TikZ (huge manual! but you only need a tiny fraction of it). Once a drawing is made, it can be used again and again.

Also, text with fractions and white space for filling in is easy, also with proper alignment.

Finally, there are document classes for such kind of question sheets.

You could start learning it, let us know if you have any specific questions. You can start a new topic / thread for each single task if you like, it's better to handle.

Stefan

[LaTexLearner]

Thanks for replying!

Basically you're saying it's absolutely worth it to learn LaTeX.

That would mean that it's feasible to "program" the number lines and and format them all consistently and easily? What about answer keys?