[texhax] description of text in {\tt }

[P. R. Stanley]

>         Paul:
>My favourite LaTeX documentation would contain more words describing
> > the physical effect of the commands in specific packages. I
> > appreciate that LaTeX is mainly concerned with the logical layout of
> > the document, hence its appeal to a lot of blind people, however, for
> > those of us who want to do more than typesetting articles it would be
> > amply useful to have a visual perspective of the end result in PDF or
> > DVI, the rationale being that we can then decide when and where to
> > introduce that \tt, mbox or ... command.
>
>         Nicola:
>The HTML version of my "LaTeX for Complete Novices" tutorial uses
>bitmaps to show the example output but where the alt tag isn't
>sufficient to describe the output, the bitmap is linked to a page with a
>more in depth description (e.g. both bitmaps in
>http://theoval.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~nlct/latex/novices/itemize.html). Is this
>the kind of thing that you're thinking about? Any comments to help
>improve the accessibility would be very welcome.
         Paul:
Here's an extract on unordered lists taken from Nicola's page:

Lstart extract
Each \item  command has produced a bullet point offset from the left 
margin. The text following the \item  command is set in a block 
following on from the bullet point. There is a blank line before and 
after each item in the list.
end extract

That's "essentially" the sort of thing we need in the documentation. 
I would add details of indentations -- are the bullet points or the 
text items indented in relation to the normal paragraph? What happens 
to alignment if the text of an item requires two or more lines?
I wonder if a good description of plain Tex commands would add 
efficiency to the solution under discussion.

Any thoughts?

Cheers
Paul