> At the present time we are not distributing the modified TeX sources that generate these tagged examples
Why not?
LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#12Is this pdf standard freely accessible? How widely supported even PDF 2.0 is?
It is free - https://pdfa.org/announcing-no-cost-access-to-iso-32000-2-pd...
Thank you so much! Very nice to see that ISO was convinced to once again follow the promise (to Adobe) of no-cost access to the PDF standard that they kept until PDF 1.7 but broke with PDF 2.0.
However, TFA is not about PDF, it is about a profile called PDF/UA-2 aka ISO 14289-2. That one is $223 from the PDF Association[1] or 173 CHF from the ISO[2].
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#13[deleted]
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#14> Using Tagged PDF for Accessibility and Reuse in PDF 2.0
This sounds amazing! Some years ago I was involved with a project for a company where we tried to extract some data from some PDF files they had. But neither OCR nor my attempts at reconstructing order of text in the documents panned out in the end, and it all ended in tears :(
Perhaps one day in the future dealing with extracting data from PDFs will be less of a mess.
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#15If you are interested in this work, you could look into joining or just supporting the TeX Users Group, https://www.tug.org, or your local users group. A lot of folks doing good things, including the ones who are doing this.
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#16If you are interested in this work, you could look into joining or just supporting the TeX Users Group, https://www.tug.org , or your local users group. A lot of folks doing good things, including the ones who are doing this.
and for anyone in the TeX User Group there is this fun experiment in Typesetting which starts off with the amazing TeX origin story
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#17can 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 viewer…
Sounds like this would massively simplify converting scientific articles back to HTML or text.
Seriously, I know of one experiment that has O(thousands) of papers as latex source, which they publish as PDFs and which (more recently) they convert back to markdown with some ML-based image to text engine. All so that it can be fed to a vector database to make searching easier, of course.
PDFs are a terrible format for machine readable information (and thus for reproducible science), but they are the currency of the scientific community and as such will be the standard output for the foreseeable future.
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 viewer…
Sounds like this would massively simplify converting scientific articles back to HTML or text. Seriously, I know of one experiment that has O(thousands) of papers as latex source, which they publish as PDFs and which (more recently) they convert back to markdown with some ML-based image to text engine. All so that it can be fed to a vector database to make searching easier, of course. PDFs are a terrible format for m…
>PDFs are a terrible format for machine readable information
was terrible format.
PDF 2.0 Tagged PDF has MathML support, Index, Quote, BibEntry, Title, lists, tables, .... you can derive HTML from PDF if it's fully tagged.
PDF also support displaying and print production better than anything.
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like this would massively simplify converting scientific articles back to HTML or text. Seriously, I know of one experiment that has O(thousands) of papers as latex source, which they publish as PDFs and which (more recently) they convert back to markdown with some ML-based image to text engine. All so that it can be fed to a vector database to make searching easier, of course. PDFs are a terrible format for m…
>PDFs are a terrible format for machine readable information was terrible format. PDF 2.0 Tagged PDF has MathML support, Index, Quote, BibEntry, Title, lists, tables, .... you can derive HTML from PDF if it's fully tagged. PDF also support displaying and print production better than anything.
I'd argue it still is a terrible format for anything other than printing. It values form over function. I mean this makes sense for laying out papers to be published into a physical journal, but it doesn't make as much sense for other purposes.
I'd much rather have plain text, or markdown, or asciidoc than PDF or HTML. It works everywhere. And support for embedded mathematical typesetting is a solved problem.
Re: LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
>PDFs are a terrible format for machine readable information was terrible format. PDF 2.0 Tagged PDF has MathML support, Index, Quote, BibEntry, Title, lists, tables, .... you can derive HTML from PDF if it's fully tagged. PDF also support displaying and print production better than anything.
I'd argue it still is a terrible format for anything other than printing. It values form over function. I mean this makes sense for laying out papers to be published into a physical journal, but it doesn't make as much sense for other purposes. I'd much rather have plain text, or markdown, or asciidoc than PDF or HTML. It works everywhere. And support for embedded mathematical typesetting is a solved problem.
I agree plain text has a lot of appeal. But support for embedded mathematical typesetting, images etc, being solved feels like a stretch.
I mean sure, you can do it, but now you are on the other end of function over form.
I feel like PDFs are, for tons of usecases, the best we've got. The alternative isn't markdown, it's usually .docx.