[pdftex] experiment with tagged PDF

[Neil Soiffer]

As a member of AIIM's PDF/UA (Universal
Accessibility)<http://www.aiim.org/standards.asp?ID=27861>working
group, I'm really happy to see someone has taken an interest in
creating tagged PDF -- tagging is really important for those that need to
use assistive technology to access PDF documents.

For the math part, make sure you tag the math as "formula".  Ideally, you
should tag each subexpression with the appropriate MathML element name (eg,
"mfrac" for fractions), but at the very least, add a "tex" attribute to
"formula" and include the TeX string.  You could also add an "alt" attribute
to "formula" that contains the TeX, but as "alt" is meant to be human
readable, it is questionable whether TeX is really appropriate there.

FYI:  PDF has been turned over to ISO by Adobe and is ISO 32000-1.  It has
been approved as an ISO spec, but not yet published.  PDF/UA is hoping to
submit their proposal to ISO for consideration at the fall meeting.
Approval under ISO takes 2-3 years from the time of first submission, so it
will be awhile before PDF/UA sees the light of day.  All of the requirements
of PDF/UA are legal under PDF 1.7 and ISO 32000-1, so tagging the math as I
suggest above (or any other PDF/UA recommendation) does not need to wait for
formal ISO approval.

I hope your "experiment" is successful -- pdftex should produce PDF that is
accessible by all.

    Neil


On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 3:44 AM, The Thanh Han <hanthethanh at gmail.com>
wrote:

> [for those who are not on the ntg-pdftex dev list]
>
> there is a patch to experiment with tagged pdf:
>
> http://sarovar.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=945&group_id=106&atid=495
>
>
> Thanh
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>