Publications in 2025

PDF Days Europe 2025, Berlin, Germany

Tagged and Accessible PDF with LaTeX – revisited

• Frank Mittelbach and Ulrike Fischer
• Video of the talk presented at PDF Days Europe September 2025
• Keywords: LaTeX, tagging, accessibility, project status
• Abstract

  At the PDF days Europe 2022 we outlined the goals of our multi-year project for transforming LaTeX to automatically generate accessible and reusable PDF with no or only minimal configuration adjustments [1, 2]. At that point we were executing phase II (out of six phases) of this project. By now we are in the process of finishing phase IV and are able to report on a number of success stories, including

  • LaTeX’s capability to automatically generate accessible PDF conforming to the PDF/UA-2 and WTPDF (Well-Tagged PDF) standards [3]
  • LaTeX’s capability to produce PDF/UA-1 documents if required by a workflow (not recommended, because UA-1 is not really suitable for representing STEM documents with mathematical content)
  • The ability to automatically generate and embed MathML directly in the PDF to produce high-quality accessible STEM documents [4]
  • The successful transformation of the LaTeX eco-system; as of now roughly 1000 extension packages are useable when targeting accessible output. This is ongoing work with more and more packages and classes being adjusted over time [5].

  In this talk we discuss the current state of the project, the existing achievements, and our plans for the future.

  References

  [1] Frank Mittelbach, Ulrike Fischer, and Chris Rowley. LaTeX Tagged PDF Feasibility Evaluation. LaTeX Project, Sept. 2020. https://latex-project.org/publications/indexbyyear/2020/

  [2] Frank Mittelbach and Chris Rowley: LaTeX Tagged PDF — A blueprint for a large project. TUGboat 41(3):292–298, 2020. https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-3/tb129mitt-tagpdf.pdf

  [3] Frank Mittelbach, David Carlisle, Ulrike Fischer and Joseph Wright: Automatically producing accessible and reusable PDFs with LaTeX. DocEng 2024, August 2024, San Jose, USA. https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2024-FMi-DPC-UFi-JAW-doceng24.pdf

  [4] Frank Mittelbach, David Carlisle, Ulrike Fischer and Joseph Wright: MathML and other XML Technologies for Accessible PDF from LaTeX. Paper submitted to DocEng 2025, September 2025, Nottingham, UK. https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2025-FMi-DPC-UFi-JAW-DocEng2025-MathML-and-other-XML.pdf

  [5] LaTeX Project: Tagging Status of LaTeX Packages and Classes. https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/tagging-status

The talk was recorded and will become available on the PDFA website soon.

The slides of the presentation are available here. The audio renderings presented as as part of the talk are the untagged math formulas and later on the tagged math formulas for comparison.

Overcoming the sentiment that PDFs are evil (at least for accessible math)

• Poster for the poster session at PDF Days Europe September 2025
• Keywords: LaTeX, tagging, accessibility, accessible math

This poster shows an end-to-end workflow for truly accessible PDFs containing math and other complex material. It also discusses the general challenges when trying to produce accessible STEM documents and explains why the PDF/UA-1 standard (in contrast to the PDF/UA-2 standard) is not suitable for documents containing mathematics.

News from the LaTeX Tagged PDF project: 2025

• Ulrike Fischer and Frank Mittelbach
• TUGboat 46:2, 2025
• Keywords: LaTeX, tagging, accessibility
• Abstract

  The LaTeX Tagged PDF project was started in spring 2020 and announced to the TeX community by the LaTeX Team at the (online) 2020 TUG conference. This short report describes some news of this multiyear project.

ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2025 (DocEng 2025) Nottingham, UK

MathML and other XML Technologies for Accessible PDF from LaTeX

• Frank Mittelbach
• David Carlisle
• Ulrike Fischer
• Joseph Wright
• ACM Symposium for Document Engineering (DocEng 2025), Nottingham, United Kingdom, 2-5 September 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3704268.3748669
• Abstract

  In this paper we describe the current approach to using MathML within Tagged PDF to enhance the accessibility of mathematical (STEM) documents. While MathML is specified by the PDF 2.0 specification as a standard namespace for PDF Structure Elements, the interaction of MathML, which is defined as an XML vocabulary, and PDF Structure Elements (which are not defined as XML) is left unspecified by the PDF standard. This has necessitated the development of formalizations to interpret and validate PDF Structure Trees as XML, which are also introduced in this paper.

This short paper was presented at the ACM Symposium for Document Engineering (DocEng 2025); the official version is available in the ACM Digital Library. While LaTeX is capable of producing a PDF/UA-2 compliant documents, this is not necessarily the case when special journal classes are required by the publisher. The acmart class needed for DocEng proceeding supports tagging, but has some problems tagging the title correctly which is why the document, though tagged and fairly accessible, is not PDF/UA-2 compliant.

Slides of the talk are also available. These are tagged, generated using the new ltx-talk LaTeX class.