[XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance

[Andrew Cunningham]

The biggest barrier to accessible PDFs is the nature of PDF itself. It is
essentially a preprint format that deals with glyphs rather than characters.

For complex scripts that require glyph reordering, I haven't come across a
software solution that can generate suitable PDFs.

Andrew

On Monday, 27 April 2015, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Joseph Wright wrote:
>
>> Somewhat away from the original topic, but it strikes me that building a
>> tagged PDF is going to be much more problematic at the macro layer than
>> at the engine level: is that fair? Deciding what elements of a document
>> are 'structure' is hard, and in 'real' documents it's not unusual to see
>> a lot of input that's more about appearance than structure. That of
>> course isn't limited to TeX: I suspect anyone trying to generate tagged
>> output has the same concern (users do odd things).
>
> Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the
> thread, is there not only real one problem :  the need to educate users
> to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead
> to express them in well-formed XML ?  I have just finished typesetting
> (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst
> I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task
> of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were
> available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so
> had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual
> accompanying conflation of form and content.
>
> ** Phil.
>
>
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-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Project Manager, Research and Development
(Social and Digital Inclusion)
Public Libraries and Community Engagement
State Library of Victoria
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Australia

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