Conversion from PDF

[Rob Beezer]

(Cross-posting to -dev and -a11y.)

I have (finally) taken back up a project to use AI to convert a PDF into
PreTeXt. I am using examples that have LaTeX source, but that material is not
being used to guide the conversion - only to judge the results. Using
Anthropic's Fable 5.1 right now via Claude Code. I'm hoping to make this
available publicly after a few iterations.

My first test-case is a paper by David Farmer from the arXiv. Many thanks to
David for permission to redistribute the results. Conversion to PreTeXt seems
very successful - much smoother than with ChatGPT about a year ago. Rough
estimates suggest a few minutes per page at a cost of maybe $0.15 per page. And
perhaps that will improve. A little more than a half day of setup and
configuration needed to go from nothing to this first conversion.

One reason for doing this is to take a semi-opaque PDF and make accessible
versions - here PDF, HTML, and braille.

Start at an index of outputs (and the original) at:

https://pretextbook.org/beta/real-roots-2026-09-04/index.html

Some small gotchas in evidence if you look hard enough. And provoking some
places PreTeXt (generally) needs to improve. But I think you have to look hard
for real problems. And there are some surprises - DOI numbers have been
harvested and added to the references (the only allowed content change), and
check out the descriptions on the HTML version of Figure 1.1.

Suggestions and questions are of course welcome.

Rob