Publications in 2024

ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2024 (DocEng 2024) San Jose, USA

Automatically producing accessible and reusable PDFs with LaTeX

• Frank Mittelbach
• David Carlisle
• Ulrike Fischer
• Joseph Wright
• ACM Symposium for Document Engineering (DocEng 2024), San Jose, 2024
• Abstract

  In this application note we outline the goals of the “LaTeX Tagged PDF” project, describe its current status, show how it can already now been used to create accessible and reusable PDFs, and outline our future plans for a successful completion. Further information can be found at https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/.

This application note was presented at the ACM Symposium for Document Engineering (DocEng 2024); the official version is available in the ACM Digital Library, for direct access see below. While, as described in the paper, it is now possible to automatically generate accessible and PDF/UA-2 compliant documents with LaTeX, this is not necessarily the case when special journal classes are required by the publisher. The acmart class needed for DocEng proceeding does not support tagging yet, which is one of the reasons why the ACM DL contains only an inaccessible PDF of the paper.

It may take some time to make the acmart class fully compatible with the tagging extensions in all situations, because the class supports various journals (all with different frontmatter requirement), which is an area that the project hasn’t yet fully addressed.

However, for the current article (which is fairly simple from a strutural point of view) only a few modifications to the class were necessary to make it work. Thus, the version of the paper available from this site here is compliant with PDF/UA-2 and the Well-Tagged PDF (WTPDF-1.0) standard.

It has been produced using lualatex-dev (instead of pdflatex) and a patched version of the class to support tagging as far as necessary for this article. Other than that, no modifications to the LaTeX source were made.

The official version (untagged) in the ACM Library is the following:

LaTeX Tagged PDF project progress report for summer 2024

• Frank Mittelbach
• Ulrike Fischer
• TUGboat 45:2, 2024
• Abstract

  The LaTeX Tagged PDF project was started in spring 2020 and announced to the TeX community by the LaTeX team at the (online) 2020 TUG conference. This short report describes some of the progress in this multi-year project made during 2024.

Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science 2024” (DEIMS 2024) Tokyo, Japan

Enhancing LaTeX to automatically produce tagged and accessible PDF

• Frank Mittelbach
• Ulrike Fischer
• TUGboat 45:1, 2024
• Abstract

  At the TUG 2020 online conference the LaTeX Project Team announced the start of a multi-year project to enhance LaTeX so that it will 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 talk we present the current achievements of this project and the issues we encountered along the way. We also outline open areas of research and the future steps that we shall take to automatically produce well-tagged PDF that supports accessible standards (in particular, the recently finalized PDF/UA-2) as well as general reuse and further conversions. This will be achieved by embedding in the PDF a comprehensive description of the document structure.

The paper was originally presented at the DEIMS 2024 conference in Tokyo. A video of the talk, including a semi-live demonstration, is available on YouTube.