The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by Tainnor » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

konjin wrote: post #19

dewey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

1 + 1 = 2 Aren't formulas easy to insert in plain text? The problem with maths notation is that it was invented by sighted people for sighted people as a short hand for very complex ideas, which at the time weren't fully understood. If you want to type equations use s-expressions, the clarity you get from saying what you mean is astonishing. (define integral (lambda (function) ;; Implementation of Risch algorithm lef…

You're skimping on some of the complexity by equating a definition with a particular way of computing it, but that's completely inadequate for mathematics, as there are many things we can't compute (either in theory or in practice).

In particular, you definition of integral assumes that integrable functions always have an antiderivative, which is wrong.

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

#42

Post by hprotagonist » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

konjin wrote: post #28

hprotagonist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am not blind. Neither am I a mathematician. I'm a sighted biomedical engineer.

I have heard blind mathematician colleagues very loudly espouse using LaTeX for everything they do. I'm inclined to believe them!

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

#43

Post by JadeNB » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

konjin wrote: post #19

dewey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

1 + 1 = 2 Aren't formulas easy to insert in plain text? The problem with maths notation is that it was invented by sighted people for sighted people as a short hand for very complex ideas, which at the time weren't fully understood. If you want to type equations use s-expressions, the clarity you get from saying what you mean is astonishing. (define integral (lambda (function) ;; Implementation of Risch algorithm lef…

> Hey look, you don't need the dummy variable explicitly any more. It's almost like it's a relic from a time before people understood what function application actually was.

If you actually perform definite integration, as a limit of Riemann (or Lebesgue, if you like) sums, or even try to approximate it numerically, you're going to have some dummy variable cropping back up again. As your comment indicates, when Risch's theorem proves that there is no elementary anti-derivative, you're going to be out of luck.

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

#44

Post by JadeNB » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #41

konjin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 + 1 = 2 Aren't formulas easy to insert in plain text? The problem with maths notation is that it was invented by sighted people for sighted people as a short hand for very complex ideas, which at the time weren't fully understood. If you want to type equations use s-expressions, the clarity you get from saying what you mean is astonishing. (define integral (lambda (function) ;; Implementation of Risch algorithm lef…

You're skimping on some of the complexity by equating a definition with a particular way of computing it, but that's completely inadequate for mathematics, as there are many things we can't compute (either in theory or in practice). In particular, you definition of integral assumes that integrable functions always have an antiderivative, which is wrong.

> In particular, you definition of integral assumes that integrable functions always have an antiderivative, which is wrong.

I was objecting at the same time as you were, but I don't think this is the right objection. It's true that not every integrable function has an elementary anti-derivative, but every integrable function f does have an anti-derivative F, at least in the sense that F is almost everywhere differentiable, and the derivative is almost everywhere equal to f. (And, of course, if f is continuous, then F is everywhere differentiable, and its derivative everywhere equals f.)

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

#45

Post by JadeNB » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

scoresmoke wrote: post #37

Even though LaTeX is still not very close to producing perfectly accessible PDF documents, there is some recent work towards this goal. - https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf - https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility I am using the former for some personal documents and found that it improves text selection and copying on Apple devices. (This could be related to how PDFKit handles text.) Edit: formatting.

accessibility, which its own author says not to use any more (or at least not until foundational problems are fixed), is mentioned in the article.

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

#46

Post by ketzu » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

mci wrote: post #35

1. Needs (2016) in the title. 2. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX. 3. The author bizzarely links to "the mess" of the literate source of TeX the program as a WEB file rather than as a typeset document. 4. AIUI, the source code of the TeX engine has nothing/very little to do with adding tags to PDFs, which it is the job for LaTeX packages. Admittedly, understanding and writing their source co…

> 2. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX.

Is that true? My experience was that pdftex is by far the most used one, but while thinking about it, I noticed I have zero data to back that up.

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

#47

Post by bfirsh » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

Converting LaTeX to HTML may be a route to making it accessible. I'm working on this project: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo

It's 80% of the way there, but with 80% more work it could be a pretty complete implementation.

It powers this: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/

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

#48

Post by choeger » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

The thing is: LaTeX might try hard to look like a declarative language for structured documents, but it is not. It is a set of TeX macros. And TeX is a type setting system.

There is no good reason to put the accessibility into the type setting. Instead, use a declarative (e.g., any markup) language, translate that a) to (LaTeX) and b) to accessibility annotations and then combine the two results. Problem solved.

Unfortunately you will either lose a lot of expressiveness along the way or you have to find a very sophisticated markup language.

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

#49

Post by formerly_proven » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #39

HarryHirsch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At risk of gatekeeping, it doesn’t sound like typesetters merit the title of engineer.

That's because it wasn't.

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

#50

Post by throw0101a » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 8:47 PM UTC

HarryHirsch wrote: post #22

dewey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Back in the day we had engineers writing documents from markup.

Back in the day secretaries were creating electronic documents with troff and nroff:

> The first version of Unix was developed on a PDP-7 which was sitting around Bell Labs. In 1971 the developers wanted to get a PDP-11 for further work on the operating system. In order to justify the cost for this system, they proposed that they would implement a document-formatting system for the Bell Labs patents department[1]. This first formatting program was a reimplementation of McIllroy's roff, written by Joe F. Ossanna.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff