Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> To make sure you got everything right, you can enable the new PDF/UA-1 export. PDF/UA is an international standard that helps to create universally accessible PDF files. When it is enabled, Typst will run additional checks against your document to find accessibility issues and optimize for accessibility rather than compatibility. It will find issues such as missing document titles, wrong heading hierarchies, and missing alternative descriptions.

This sounds great! Are accessible PDFs possible with LaTeX? Last time I looked, it wasn't a standard feature and there didn't seem to be any easy workaround which is a real problem when there's a requirement to produce accessible PDFs.

LaTeX has made great progress on this front in the past years and results are now available in TeX Live 2025. Compared to Typst, on one hand the tagging is still opt-in [1]. On the other hand, LaTeX already targets PDF/UA-2 including automatic tagging for math formulas, while Typst currently targets PDF/UA-1, so you have to tag the math formulas manually, like an image. This is evolving fast though: yesterday a draft PR for Typst was opened[2] to add support for MathML Core, which I guess is a big step towards automatic tagging of math since the math tags in PDF/UA-2 are based on MathML.

Another thing to consider is compatibility of third-party packages: LaTeX packages often require adjustements and many important packages work now but many still don't work, including some big ones like Beamer and tufte-book [3]. I think Typst packages should require fewer adjustments, thanks to the way "show rules" work: a package (or the user) can write a show rule to transform an element for rendering, but Typst automatically retains the semantic meaning of the original element.

[1] https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/documentation/usage...

[2] https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/7206

[3] https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/tagging-status/

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