[XeTeX] potential new feature: \XeTeXgenerateactualtext

[Ross Moore]

Hi Will,

> On Feb 25, 2016, at 5:19 PM, Will Robertson <will at wspr.io> wrote:
> 
> Hi Ross,
> 
> Great to hear from you.
> I thought of you straight away when writing my email :)
> 
> 
>> On 25 Feb 2016, at 11:35 AM, Ross Moore <ross.moore at mq.edu.au> wrote:
>> 
>> You have to be *very* careful with /ActualText, since it must be done using PDFdoc encoding, 
>> as it becomes part of the page contents stream.
>> Any errors will corrupt the PDF file completely — but that’s true of other things as well.
>> Heiko’s  \pdfstringdef  in the hyperref package is very good for handling this…
> 
> That’s good to know, thanks.
> I think there has been *some* work by one or two of the LaTeX3 members on general methods for this sort of thing, but it’s been a while.

Send me their names.
I may have a bit more time this year.


>> Look at some of my papers associated with TUG conferences, to see various
>> options that can be used to make mathematics more accessible in PDFs; i.e.,
>> papers numbered as 5, 6, 7 on this page: 
>> 
>>      http://www.tug.org/twg/accessibility/
>> 
>> Although these were done using pdfTeX, some of these things should be able
>> to be implemented for XeTeX + xdvipdfmx  also.
> 
> This is exactly where I was going with all this (so we’re getting quite far away from the new primitive).
> My understanding is that the extended pdfTeX you were using was included in TeX Live 2015, is that right? Or will be in TL2016?

The later papers, which are not directly on “Tagged PDF”, don’t require
the special tagging features.

> How much work would it be to translate that work into something that will also function in XeTeX?

That depends on how easy it is to create PDF objects and object references
between them.
Since I don’t know how  xdvipdfmx does it — using pdfmark ?  as does dvips ?
then it’s nowhere near as convenient as with pdfTeX.

Hopefully someone with the necessary experience can pick up on those ideas.
That’s why I’ve followed up your comment on this list.
Indeed, we need someone to get  pdfx.sty  working with XeLaTeX;
it’s for similar reasons that it doesn’t do so already.

Switch it to another thread, if you think that is appropriate.

> Cheers,
> Will

Cheers,

	Ross