LaTeX No LaTeX

[Rob Beezer]

With my assistant, I have made a big push to implement my "LaTeX No LaTeX"
project from two years ago. It never really got past a proof-of-concept. The
detailed work was really laborious and exhausting, even if each small step was
satisfying. I caught my assistant during the 3-day window that the Feds allowed
Anthropic's Fable 5 model to run free in the wind, and let him loose.

TL;DR:

* We can make PDF/UA-1 (accessible) PDFs from PreTeXt source.
* We do not use LaTeX at all, MathJax does all the mathematics.
* Tool chain is
- PreTeXt -> XSL:FO (XML spec for 'Formatting Objects")
- XSL:FO -> PDF/UA-1 (Apache FOP processor)
* Development loop is supervised by
- PreTeXt schema
- XSL:FO schema
- FOP processor fails if accessibility is violated
- veraPDF accessibulity checker

Notes:

* 118 commits. ;-) But maybe just 10 hours of work.
* There is a "roadmap" file in /doc if you want more info.
* Lots more work to do - I know about many rough edges. But we have good
coverage of PreTeXt elements and print-oriented publisher switches.
* There are some Debian dependencies, so you may have to fiddle if you want to
try this at home.
* Perfect now maybe for that one-file PDF accessible syllabus your
administration thinks you can easily produce? (If somebody sends me a PreTeXt
syllabus that is not too involved I might be able to build the PDF. Tonight.)
* Presaged on "pretext-a11y" a couple days ago. ;-)


Website Links at https://pretextbook.org/examples.html

Development test article:
see new "Accessible PDF via XSL Formatting Objects" section

Sample article:
see last link in this group for new PDF

Rob

[Rob Beezer]

An update on progress.

* David Austin built an accessible PDF of his ULA textbook. This exposed some
issues with PreFigure SVG encountered in the connversion. So we have made some
beneficial changes in both PreTeXt and PreFigure. Otherwise, it looks good to him.

* Sean Fitzpatrick and Alex Jordan donated three course syllabi and they have
all been rendered to accessible PDF. See the "pretext-a11y" group. This has
led to some major improvements to how tables are handled.

* Attached is the development article for this conversion, but now using the
Latin Modern font, and hence it looks like LaTeX, not Not LaTeX. This is now
the default font.

Rob

[Jason Siefken]

This is really cool! Is there a way to make the text of equations selectable?

[Rob Beezer]

Lots of work the past week-plus on the XSL-FO conversion. Website examples have
been updated. "FO dev article" has some new material. I know the backmatter of
the sample article needs help - just have not gotten there.

Some general news, with comparison to the stock LaTeX conversion. Remember -
the produced PDFs remain PDF/UA-1 accessible.

Tables - less rigid, automatic word-wrapping if cells are too wide, automatic
page-breaking. Big win, I think.

Lists - seem about on par

Multicolumn (@cols) - very weak, visually and accessiblillily.

Index - in contrast, two-column look is great on a fresh page.

Fonts - huge win. Way better. With some minor gotchas.

Footnotes - a few bumps in the road, but nothing like the tcolorbox mess.

Styling - likely fewer options, e.g. rounded corners on a box are not possible

Good news is that almost every deficiency has been addressed succesfully by my
asisstant (with lots of guidance).

See Example 7.5 in the FO dev article:
- #xref authored inside an #md
- Offline mathJax migrates it as a link
into the SVG that is the math display
- SVG goes into the PDF with a live link,
PyMuPDF does surgery to make it accessible