LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#2Is this pdf standard freely accessible? How widely supported even PDF 2.0 is?
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#3Is 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?
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#4Is 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?
> 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...
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#5can somebody explain?
I already can create PDF from latex, what does this repo add to it?
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#6Is 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?
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.
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#7can somebody explain? I already can create PDF from latex, what does this repo add to it?
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.
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#8Is this pdf standard freely accessible? How widely supported even PDF 2.0 is?
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#9Is this pdf standard freely accessible? How widely supported even PDF 2.0 is?
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.
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#10can somebody explain? I already can create PDF from latex, what does this repo add to it?
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.