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

[Mitch Keller]

Just gave this a whirl using the pretext/pretext script, since I don't see that there was a resolution to the discussion about project.ptx specifications for this in the CLI, and my syllabus looks so spiffy to submit to our campus repository!

The one thing I wanted to ping here is that I've got a subtitle for the article that is my root element, but it's being silently dropped in the pdf-fo conversion. I can file an issue if that's useful, as there's plenty of workarounds I can use for the time being.

[Rob Beezer]

Not much of a rush in mny mind for the CLI, since as you can tell, this will
continue to need work.

And this is exactly how I plan to approach it - see what needs help and report
it. I did a massive visual scan of the sample article a few weeks ago, and
caught a whole lot of changes that needed to be made, but there is no way I saw
everything.

Fixed now (also for #book), so do a pull and take it for a spin before adding to
your campus repository.

Thanks very much for trying this out, and for the (enthusiastic) report. It'd
be fun to see what your campus accessibility folks think of it.

https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/pull/3184

Rob

Note: we have a TeX-like font in place for this conversion (Latin Modern) -
shipping in the repository. I'm thinking of adding a second "out of the box"
font that looks less math-y and more serious-text-y, which could be even better
for something like a syllabus. But that is a bigger project that is not so
urgent at the moment. (And I only plan two fonts for "Tier 1" font support,
more on that later.)

Note: an issue is certainly great long-term, but I can just as well work off a
post here if I hop on it right away.

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[Mitch Keller]

Glorious! Thanks, Rob (and assistant) for getting a fix in quickly. It’s looking good on the accessibility checks that I’m running. There’s a couple of table issues, but I think that’s because I haven’t coded the tabular right in PreTeXt with headers, so fixing that (and finishing the details of my syllabus for the class I have to teach next Thursday) are at the top of my list.

Mitch

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-- 
Mitch Keller
mi...@rellek.net

http://www.rellek.net/

[Rob Beezer]

Excellent! That looks good. Now just make sure the course goes as well. ;-)

On 8/27/26 11:14, Mitch Keller wrote:
> Glorious! Thanks, Rob (and assistant) for getting a fix in quickly. It’s looking
> good on the accessibility checks that I’m running. There’s a couple of table
> issues, but I think that’s because I haven’t coded the tabular right in PreTeXt
> with headers, so fixing that (and finishing the details of my syllabus for the
> class I have to teach next Thursday) are at the top of my list.
>
> Mitch
>

> PastedGraphic-2.tiff
>
>> On Aug 27, 2026, at 12:46 PM, 'Rob Beezer' via PreTeXt development <pretext-

> dev/5DA63055-822E-4D0D-A1F3-45C5088C8C2E%40rellek.net <https://
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> A1F3-45C5088C8C2E%40rellek.net?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.