Publications by topic: PDF, Tagging, Accessibility

LaTeX Tagged PDF — A blueprint for a large project

• Frank Mittelbach
• Chris Rowley
• TUGboat 41:3, 2020
• Abstract

  In Frank’s talk at the TUG 2020 online conference we announced the start of a multi-year project to enhance LaTeX to fully and naturally support the creation of structured document formats, in particular the “tagged PDF” format as required by accessibility standards such as PDF/UA.

  In this short article we outline the background to this project and some of its history so far. We then describe the major features of the project and the tasks involved, of which more details can be found in the Feasibility Study that was prepared as the first part of our co-operation with Adobe.

  This leads on to a description of how we plan to use the study as the basis for our work on the project and some details of our planned working methodologies, illustrated by what we have achieved so far and leading to a discussion of some of the obstacles we foresee.

  Finally there is also a summary of recent, current and upcoming activities on and around the project.

LaTeX Tagged PDF Feasibility Evaluation Study

• Frank Mittelbach
• Ulrike Fischer
• Chris Rowley
• Written: December 2019 with minor updates September 2020

This forty-page document contains information about a multi-year project, started by the LaTeX Project Team in 2020, that will extend LaTeX to produce tagged, and hence accessible, PDF with minimal manual intervention. It explains in detail both the project goals and the tasks that need to be undertaken, concluding with a detailed project plan. It is our blueprint for for how we think the project should be undertaken.

The Introduction contains an overview of the benefits of the project and explains why LaTeX documents make a good starting point for the production of tagged PDF. More information about this blueprint and the project can be found in the article “LaTeX Tagged PDF — A blueprint for a large project” TUGboat, Volume 41-3 (2020), which will appear shortly.

The original version of this study dates from late 2019 and was addressed primarily to an audience within Adobe which consisted of engineers and managers with a wide knowledge of digital typography and electronic publishing but not necessarily much background within the specialized world of TeX, LaTeX and friends. This version of the study was updated in September 2020 with some minor redactions, corrections and clarifications.

TUG Conference 2020 (Online conference)

Quo vadis LaTeX(3) Team — A look back and at the upcoming years

• Frank Mittelbach
• TUGboat 41:2, 2020
• Abstract

  This is a brief write-up of a talk given by the author at the TUG’20 online conference.

The talk touches briefly on the questions “where we are coming from” (we being the LaTeX Project Team), “where we are now” and then focusses on the LaTeX Project’s plans for the upcoming years, which will primarily be focussed on providing an out-of-the box solution for generating tagged PDF with LaTeX and will include gentle refactoring of parts of the core LaTeX and providing important functionality, such as extended standard support for color, hyperlinks etc., as part of the kernel.

This is a multi-year journey that we have just started and we will briefly explain the places this will take us through. At its end we expect that LaTeX users are able to produce tagged and “accessible” PDF without the need to post-process the result of their LaTeX run.

A video of the presentation given by Frank is available on the TUG YouTube channel.

Creating accessible pdfs with LaTeX

• Ulrike Fischer
• TUGboat 41:1, 2020
• Abstract

  This article describes the current state and planned actions to improve accessibility of pdfs created with LaTeX, as currently undertaken by the LaTeX Team.

Accessibility in the LaTeX kernel — experiments in Tagged PDF

• Chris Rowley
• Ulrike Fischer
• Frank Mittelbach
• TUGboat 40:2, 2019
• Abstract

  This is a brief summary of a talk given by the first author at the TUG’19 conference, together with some references for further reading and viewing.

TUG Conference 2019 (Palo Alto, USA)

Accessibility in the LaTeX kernel — experiments in tagged PDF (slides)

• Chris Rowley and Ulrike Fischer
• TUG Conference 2019 (Palo Alto, USA)