The biggest barrier to accessible PDFs is the nature of PDF itself. It is essentially a preprint format that deals with glyphs rather than characters.
For complex scripts that require glyph reordering, I haven't come across a software solution that can generate suitable PDFs. Andrew On Monday, 27 April 2015, Philip Taylor <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk> wrote: > > > Joseph Wright wrote: > >> Somewhat away from the original topic, but it strikes me that building a >> tagged PDF is going to be much more problematic at the macro layer than >> at the engine level: is that fair? Deciding what elements of a document >> are 'structure' is hard, and in 'real' documents it's not unusual to see >> a lot of input that's more about appearance than structure. That of >> course isn't limited to TeX: I suspect anyone trying to generate tagged >> output has the same concern (users do odd things). > > Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the > thread, is there not only real one problem : the need to educate users > to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead > to express them in well-formed XML ? I have just finished typesetting > (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst > I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task > of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were > available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so > had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual > accompanying conflation of form and content. > > ** Phil. > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > -- Andrew Cunningham Project Manager, Research and Development (Social and Digital Inclusion) Public Libraries and Community Engagement State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia Ph: +61-3-8664-7430 Mobile: 0459 806 589 Email: acunning...@slv.vic.gov.au lang.supp...@gmail.com http://www.openroad.net.au/ http://www.mylanguage.gov.au/ http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/
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