Talks from the TUG Conference 2023 in Bonn | Hacker News Reader

Talks from the TUG Conference 2023 in Bonn

latex-project.org

63 pointsericdanielski15 comments

One big important project, which is making good progress, is "tagged PDFs".

The biggest advantage of these is that they should be, eventually, accessible to blind people, unlike normal PDFs created by LaTeX which are not that much better than a blank page to be honest (this isn't PDF's fault, Microsoft Word PDFs are very accessible).

For exciting reasons to do with the internals of TeX (mainly, it's actually a programming language, although it looks like a markup language), I know this has been a major project that has taken many years, and will take many more -- but I personally consider it a fairly big embarassment of academia, which often claims it wants to be open and accessible, that we lock so much of our research in a format which many people simply can't read.

Wouldn't this require authors to use semantic tags instead of visual-presentation ones? That is, a tag that specifies that what follows is code instead of just \texttt{}, a tag specifying that what follows is e.g. the title of a book instead of just \textit{}, etc. The TeX engine itself, as it processes the source into a PDF, cannot know what the original author meant.

This isn't about text formatting. It's about things like reading order, alternative text for figures, or even just making clear to the PDF engine that two consecutive words are part of the same paragraph (which isn't even the case by default!). Take a look at this: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/An_introduction_to_tagg... As GP said, it's really shameful that, in academia, we just ignore this kind of stuff. I tried making my articles' PDFs accessible and failed miserably.

I recently had a coworker share a resume they had created with LaTeX. It was beautiful.

As someone not as interested in committing fully to LaTeX — but wanting a similar outcome — I found that I could achieve a pretty but easy to edit resume with Markdown and rendered via Pandoc because Pandoc supports LaTeX (among many other formats).

Here is a great GitHub repo that helped me get started: https://github.com/mszep/pandoc_resume

I would love to hear of other low(er) barrier-to-entry ways to use LaTeX, because it’s a pretty steep commitment for someone who isn’t a professional writer.

Just use typst, way easier to install (single binary) and use (much easier to write directives): https://typst.app

I use the commandline binary, you could use the website as well.

typst people on latex posts are like Rust people on C++ posts :) (and I say this as a Rust programmer).

With regards typst, I will consider it when there is any kind of accessible output -- at the moment it only seems to make PDFs, and those PDFs are entirely inaccessible by blind people.

Because the PDFs only carry an image? (I'm assuming if there was real text the tools could extract it, but could be wrong)

PDF to text tools can extract some text, but get confused by tables, maths, etc.

You can annotate a PDF with the raw actual text, which is then used by screen readers, but typst (and LaTeX currently) don't do this. It certainly isn't trivial to do, but it would be useful.

The other option would of course be to produce HTML, which (unless you do horrible things) is generally very accessible, but neither typst or LaTeX do this well (LaTeX does it OK, but I find I usually need to clean up the result).

PDFs produced by LaTeX aren't accessible either.

You are right, but LaTeX has the advantage of having a much bigger user base and documentation, so I'll still with it until Typst has some clear advantages (like accessibility).

> I would love to hear of other low(er) barrier-to-entry ways to use LaTeX.

My FOSS desktop editor, KeenWrite[1], converts Markdown to XHTML, XHTML into TeX, then TeX into PDF. Users may drop into TeX itself for math, if needed. Behind the scenes, KeenWrite passes the document to ConTeXt along with a theme.[2] The theme abstracts away most of the complexities of TeX.

There isn't a resume theme, yet, though there are some available for ConTeXt that would be tempting to abstract.[3]

[1]: https://keenwrite.com/

[2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/

[3]: https://github.com/BruXy/resume

KeenWrite looks very nice :-) How does it compare to LyX?

LyX and KeenWrite are altogether different. My focus for KeenWrite has been twofold: writing a sci-fi novel with a complex timeline wherein I can easily insert variables directly in the document (i.e., partial value followed by control+space) and using it at work for living technical documentation (i.e., R statements for plots, Kroki for diagrams, command-line for CI/CD pipeline integration, and plain TeX for basic math).

LyX, like LaTeX, doesn't force a separation of content from presentation. KeenWrite is focused on Markdown, with PDFs being a transformation of plain text. For more control over the output, KeenWrite adopts pandoc-style annotations. The selected theme can style the annotations as desired.

Overleaf does a great job of being a web based LaTeX editor. It generally isolates errors well and has a decide mapping between the PDF and source.

If you start from one of their templates it’s probably approachable. At least within the scientific world I’ve found overleaf makes it more approachable for students and even experienced people appreciate the value add of the collaborative features.

> I would love to hear of other low(er) barrier-to-entry ways to use LaTeX, because it’s a pretty steep commitment for someone who isn’t a professional writer.

I have been working on and off on a fork of LaTeX with real-time feedback: you can see the document and error messages rendered and updated live. It also supports SyncTeX (going from a source line to the corresponding output and vice-versa).

I added vim support recently, you can see it in action there: https://github.com/let-def/texpresso.vim There is also emacs support in the main repo (https://github.com/let-def/texpresso). That's all quite experimental, but I hope to do a first release next year. It should work on most unix, I test with Linux and macOS.

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