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Comment by troymc | Hacker News Reader

Here's a modern take: https://typst.app/

For me, there is one fundamental issue which makes me want to switch from LaTeX -- it can't produce accessible documents (and good HTML would do just fine as accessible). LaTeX is making good progress in this area.

Amazingly (to me) it seems typst is doing even worse than LaTeX, while starting much later! I'm happy to be told they have succeeded in this area of course.

While the accessibility is an important area, it affects minority of the people. You need to get the core functionality first before you can spend resources on accessibility.

Latex is very old and has the features; they can focus on accessibility now.

No, I completely disagree. You need to design accessibility in from the start, it's almost impossible to retrofit. Very few systems manage to add high-quality accessibility later on.

You should design it is not necessary to implement from the beginning.

I'm one of the Typst devs and I do agree with you here. LaTeX has a lot of trouble with accessibility because it's hard to retain semantic information through layers of macros. However, I think we are in a better starting position because Typst is designed to revolve around semantic elements that the compiler can actually understand. We haven't gotten to it yet (there's lots to do), but we want to use this information both to output Tagged PDFs and for semantic HTML export. I guess we'll see how it turns out!

I wish you the best of luck. I don’t have any time to get involved in any more open source projects, but I consider the lack of common accessible publishing formats for science one of the biggest embarrassments of academia — for a field that claims to be open, we sure seem to love churning horridly inaccessible PDFs (and yes, I’m as guilty as anyone else here).

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