[HN Gopher] LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PD...
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       LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
        
       Author : anewhnaccount2
       Score  : 74 points
       Date   : 2024-06-05 17:39 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | leni536 wrote:
       | Is this pdf standard freely accessible? How widely supported even
       | PDF 2.0 is?
        
         | nullindividual wrote:
         | It is free - https://pdfa.org/announcing-no-cost-access-to-
         | iso-32000-2-pd...
        
         | anewhnaccount3 wrote:
         | It's very early days for clients. I guess the support is not
         | really there yet. However most publishers and eprint archives
         | have settles on pdfs rather than html annoyingly, so this is
         | one of our best hopes of accessibility for academic
         | publications.
        
       | skadge wrote:
       | Is texlive 2024 producing tagged PDF out of the box? That would
       | be awesome! If not, is there somewhere some
       | instructions/tutorials explaining the steps to follow?
        
         | elashri wrote:
         | > Is texlive 2024 producing tagged PDF out of the box?
         | 
         | Not yet. There is Tagged PDF project [1] which aims to do
         | something like that. there is tagpdf [2] package that try to do
         | some of these things. If you need good instructions I would
         | suggest overleaf tagging tutorial [3].
         | 
         | [1] https://www.latex-
         | project.org/publications/indexbytopic/pdf/
         | 
         | [2] https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf
         | 
         | [3]
         | https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/An_introduction_to_tagg...
        
         | anewhnaccount3 wrote:
         | No, but it's getting easier and easier. To opt into this
         | testing stage functionality you need to add a few tags, and may
         | eventually have to work around some package incompatibilities.
         | Take a look at https://www.latex-
         | project.org/news/2023/03/13/latex-dev-1/ for more info.
        
       | oriettaxx wrote:
       | can somebody explain?
       | 
       | I already can create PDF from latex, what does this repo add to
       | it?
        
         | anewhnaccount3 wrote:
         | In the future better accessibility for screen readers of text
         | (paragraph breaks), images (alt text), tables (control of
         | reading order), and math formulae. It's up to the pdf readers
         | too though.
        
         | lxgr wrote:
         | PDF/UA makes PDFs accessible, which can otherwise be very hard
         | to parse for screenreaders or display software that wants to
         | reflow them (e.g. for reading them on small displays).
         | 
         | Without special hints (that are ignored by regular PDF readers
         | or printers), PDF is essentially a vector graphics format, and
         | any of these tasks amount to an exercise in OCR.
         | 
         | This is a somewhat little-known fact about PDFs, since many
         | viewers do in fact implement many of these OCR-like heuristics
         | to provide features such as text selection, search etc. that
         | make it look a lot like a text-based format, but it really is a
         | vector graphics format at heart. PDF/UA makes this a bit
         | easier.
         | 
         | As an example, consider a multiple column layout, as is often
         | used in scientific articles. PDF-creating software not
         | concerned with accessibility might just intersperse all columns
         | line by line (i.e. present text in _presentational_ left-to-
         | right, top-to-bottom fashion), but it could just as well
         | achieve the same outcome by drawing column by column in
         | _semantic_ order. Beyond encouraging that, I believe PDF /UA
         | also defines a bunch of (invisible) metadata tags that readers
         | can use to figure out semantic structuring of a document.
        
       | ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
       | > At the present time we are not distributing the modified TeX
       | sources that generate these tagged examples
       | 
       | Why not?
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-07 23:00 UTC)