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The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

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Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#21

Post by gwern »

svnpenn wrote: post #7

I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf Need a page break? Here you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I…

No need for (much) CSS, browsers already support vector graphics: SVG!

In Pandoc, what you would do is you would use a general Latex plugin, and then TikZ supports PNG or SVG output by 'standalone' (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/51757/how-can-i-use-...), and you can either save that to a file & use as an image or you can inline them.

This uses Latex at compile-time, but considering the extent to which TikZ is a graphics DSL, I wonder how hard it would be to implement a TikZ->SVG compiler as a standalone tool in a different language? (Or make it available in a variant like Mathjax? Like https://github.com/kisonecat/tikzjax except without running an entire TeX engine in the user's browser.)

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#22

Post by HarryHirsch »

dewey wrote: post #6
konjin wrote: post #3

>Take your average computer science graduate from the last ten years. Do you think anyone would be remotely able to understand what is going on there? Yes, you literally read the literate program of TeX and understand what's going on: http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf I had never learned Pascal but I've managed to edit and compile TeX successfully, and it was easier than trying to understand any of my own non-literate p…

> Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?

Back in the day we had engineers writing documents from markup. We called them typesetters. It was a qualified job, you don't expect the task to be something Joe Random could to with 6 weeks of training.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#23

Post by falseprofit »

dewey wrote: post #6
konjin wrote: post #3

>Take your average computer science graduate from the last ten years. Do you think anyone would be remotely able to understand what is going on there? Yes, you literally read the literate program of TeX and understand what's going on: http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf I had never learned Pascal but I've managed to edit and compile TeX successfully, and it was easier than trying to understand any of my own non-literate p…

> Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?

We're not talking about the difficulty of writing a document using LaTeX, which I think we can agree is more or less proportional to the degree of control one has over the finished product.

What's at stake here is the difficulty of editing the source code of LaTeX, which would be necessary in order to make the resulting pdf files more compatible with screen readers for the visually impaired.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#24

Post by hprotagonist »

konjin wrote: post #5
hprotagonist wrote: post #2

An answer, particularly in the sciences, is to also distribute the source *.tex files, which being plain text with markup, can be handled just fine by things like emacspeak, or accessibility tooling for other sensible editors. This comes up a bit around the blind accessibility issue for mathematics, which is why I suspect it's bubbling up this week on HN.

Standard maths notation is sight first and sight only. If you want maths for the blind you need to convert to something like s-expressions, which emacspeak and read perfectly.

There's a bunch of counter-argument here from working practising blind mathematicians who read and write raw TeX every day, so there's at least a non-zero audience.

https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need-it-0

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#25

Post by vehemenz »

rbobby wrote: post #8

Imagine how much further ahead HTML/CSS would have been if the academic crowd abandoned latex 20 years ago. Revisit this comment in 5 years.

Believe it or not, HTML, CSS, and MathML are still going pretty strong in the educational publishing industry.

MathType supports TeX input. MathJax accepts TeX input. The technology is already there, there's just very little mindshare because no one cares about accessibility.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#26

Post by dathinab »

svnpenn wrote: post #7

I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf Need a page break? Here you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I…

I wrote my bachelor thesis in markdown with inline mathtex(?) and compiler it from there with pandoc.

I also tried from/to HTML and the result is just bad. HTML isn't suited at all to write scientific documents with proper formatting.

Also I still need to do some things directly in latex and include them with inline latex in markdown.

So no HTML+CSS isn't suited for this at all.

At least for now where scientific papers are still DIN A4 real paper based/targeting.

Maybe it's time to change that. People read papers a lot in 24" Monitors, tablets, laptops and e-book readers for all of this the current formatting sucks.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#28

Post by konjin »

hprotagonist wrote: post #24
konjin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard maths notation is sight first and sight only. If you want maths for the blind you need to convert to something like s-expressions, which emacspeak and read perfectly.

There's a bunch of counter-argument here from working practising blind mathematicians who read and write raw TeX every day, so there's at least a non-zero audience. https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need-it-0

There were a bunch of mathematicians who used roman numerals for arithmetic between 0 AD and 1200AD. That they existed is not a counter-argument to the fact roman numerals are terrible to do arithmetic in. That is an argument that people can get used to anything, and become proficient enough at it that changing to a new - and better - system will set them back enough for it to be not worth while doing - for them. The same is true for modern maths notation.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#29

Post by lol768 »

aklemm wrote: post #27

I can't believe MathML just died and it's like not even part of the conversation about the history of math markup.

MathML isn't dead! Igalia have been doing some pretty great work on getting it upstreamed into Chromium, where there has been no MathML implementation (in contrast to Firefox) for some time.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#30

Post by dlivingston »

dutchmartin wrote: post #17
svnpenn wrote: post #7

I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf Need a page break? Here you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I…

Well, LaTeX is great for mathematical symbols. I have not seen a typesetting in the web space that can compare itself to LaTeX. This is why scientists from the exact sciences use it.

MathJax is routinely used for inserting equations into HTML documents [0]. A side benefit is that it uses LaTeX-like syntax for defining equations.

Static site generators like Sphinx, Hugo, and Jekyll have support for MathJax which allows for inline equations in Markdown/RsT docs. See a Sphinx example here [1].

[0]: https://www.mathjax.org

[1]: https://www.pflotran.org/documentation/theory_guide/mode_th....

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