261–270 of 325 posts
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I wrote an app called PDF Reflow that reflows the original PDF using image processing to cut out words into tiles so you see the reflowed version of the text in their original look. https://www.appblit.com/pdfreflow
Any chance of releasing an Android version?
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For the math equations, I'm curious: does MathML do any better for you than LaTeX?
Not the person you’re asking the question to, but it’s worth noting (if you don’t already know) that MathML is really not designed at all as an input language for practitioners who just want to write a few equations in some document. It’s designed as an output/presentation language so that devices that want to render some maths can do so faithfully[1]. As such, if you’re a human being who wants to typeset some equati…
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Blind person here, can confirm this. Reading PDFs with a screen reader is bad, reading PDFs that come from LaTeX is worse, reading LaTeX math is pretty much impossible. All the semantic info you need is just thrown away. You can make decently accessible PDFs but it's lots of work, you need Acrobat on the producer' side and might also need it on the consumer's side. Free tools don't even come close. There's also the f…
I made these arguments two decades ago when I was still in university that PDF is a horrible format because it's purely præsentational, especially for people with disabilities whose software relies on semantic information. LaTeX last time I used it didn't even have a different symbol for uppercase Alpha and A because the glyphs are indistinguishable. They argued that PDF was superior because the publisher could contr…
This problem is harder than you one would think naively.
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Blind person here, can confirm this. Reading PDFs with a screen reader is bad, reading PDFs that come from LaTeX is worse, reading LaTeX math is pretty much impossible. All the semantic info you need is just thrown away. You can make decently accessible PDFs but it's lots of work, you need Acrobat on the producer' side and might also need it on the consumer's side. Free tools don't even come close. There's also the f…
Yup LaTeX math doesn't make sense. I've been trying to hack my way into getting a voice model to read it but no real progress.
It was not designed to provide semantic information, unfortunately. So getting anything other than visual representation out of it is hard.
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Huh. It would seem like, of all the things which should make it easy to generate the correct accessibility information, the pipeline of compiling a paper from source code in LaTeX should nail it... maybe we should all pitch in to some pool to pay someone to put in the required effort to connect all the dots?
Kind of tangential, but it's also kind of surprising how difficult it is in LaTeX to make a plot of an equation. Say I have Equation \ref{eq}. Why can't I just say "plot \ref{eq} for x from -6 to 11" and get my graph? And yes, I know about pgfplots, PSTricks, TikZ etc. But in all those cases, I need to define the same equation twice, in different syntax to boot. It's kind of unsatisfying.
Pretty much for the same reason you cannot press a word and get a pop-up dictionary definition in a paper book.
It would be neat if they offered submitters the chance to upload their own HTML version alongside the PDF version, instead of always relying on an automatic conversion process. - I can imagine authors feeling frustrated if someone reaches out about a problem in the HTML version of their paper, but they have no way to correct it except by hoping that a change to the PDF fixes a change to the generated HTML. Easier to…
It would be neat if they offered submitters the chance to upload their own HTML version alongside the PDF version, instead of always relying on an automatic conversion process. - I can imagine authors feeling frustrated if someone reaches out about a problem in the HTML version of their paper, but they have no way to correct it except by hoping that a change to the PDF fixes a change to the generated HTML. Easier to…
Most authors probably have no interest in learning html. Also most authors want nothing to do with the work by the time its submitted. It was probably hell getting the project to that point of publishing, they want to be done with it and move on to the next thing going on in their career asap.
Enough!
My proof: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrMc8AAAAJ&hl=en
I just hope they don't stop to offer the papers in PDF. Even when I'm on a computer, I still prefer to read PDFs.
There is a taste component to it of course, but the history of PDF shows that it's the wrong format for reading on a computer. It was originally meant to be the end result of a publishing process before printing, a layer that sits right between the publishing software and the postscript that gets sent to the printer. This makes the PDF format quite inflexible for reading on a computer, with it being impossible to pro…
As an academic researcher, generally speaking I also prefer PDF, and the inflexibility and static nature is a feature, not a bug. I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc.
The exception is if I wanted to just skim a paper; in this case, I think I'd prefer HTML.
I'm a huge fan of what arXiv is doing here. It effectively preserves the status quo, while adding an additional option on the side. The HTML option might prove a little bit useful for me, and it is likely to prove extremely useful for people with disabilities.