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?