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Comment by oever | Hacker News Reader

Always use PDF/A-1a (Tagged PDF) which contains the text in accessible format. For many governments this a legal requirement.

With tagged PDF it's easy to get the text out.

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LaTeX does not support PDF/A btw.

Not by default, but the pdfx package enables this, Peter Selinger has a nice guide: https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/pdfa/

The linked instructions cover PDF/A-1b (have plain text version of contents), but Tagged PDF is more than that -- it's about encoding the structure of the document.

There is a POC package for producing Tagged PDF here https://github.com/AndyClifton/accessibility but it's not a complete solution yet.

Here is an excellent review article that talks about all the other options for producing Tagged PDFs from LaTeX (spoiler — there is no solution currently): https://umij.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/the-sad-state-of-pdf-a... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24444427

It's not automatic, but also not that difficult to support

https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/pdfa/#3

"The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24444427

It's better format but still less accessible for machine translators. Most translating system don't support PDF or only limited support.

> For many governments this a legal requirement.

As in Healthcare.

I'm confused as to what this comment means. Would you please clarify it?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/as_in

Is he implying that providing healthcare is a legal requirement for most governments? If so, that seems off-topic.

They are saying that, like many governments, healthcare requires the use of the PDF/A-1a standard.

That is it.

You mean, like many (non-US) governments, (the US) healthcare requires the use of the PDF/A-1a? It's just a somewhat bizarre contraposition: "Like many animals, Helianthus annuus needs water to survive". Wait, but it's a plant, right? "Yes, and it needs water, just like animals".

I just assumed that they meant that there are many healthcare orgs that require this standard.

As (it also is) in healthcare.

I'm surprised no ever uses XDP.

A flattened XFA/XDP PDF (no interactive elements) is more or less a PDF/A.

Do popular tools support creating XDP PDF?

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