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HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)

(info.arxiv.org)
262 points el3ctron | 7 comments | 06 Dec 25 14:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.019s | source | bottom
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percentcer ◴[06 Dec 25 20:06 UTC] No.46176216[source]▶
Dumb question but what stops browsers from rendering TeX directly (aside from the work to implement it)? I assume it's more than just the rendering
replies(2): >>46176253 #>>46176297 #
1. pwdisswordfishy ◴[06 Dec 25 20:11 UTC] No.46176253[source]▶
For starters, TeX is Turing-complete, and the tokenizer is arbitrarily reprogrammable at runtime.
replies(3): >>46176306 #>>46176542 #>>46181967 #
2. ErroneousBosh ◴[06 Dec 25 20:20 UTC] No.46176306[source]▶
Okay then, what would stop you rendering TeX to SVG and embedding that?

Edit: Genuine question, not rhetorical - I don't know how well it would work but it sounds like it should.

replies(1): >>46176499 #
3. fooofw ◴[06 Dec 25 20:50 UTC] No.46176499[source]▶
That would (mostly if not always) work in the sense of reproducing the layout of the pages, but would defeat the purpose of preserving the semantic information present in the TeX file (what is a heading, a reference and to what, a specific math environment, etc.) which is AFAIK already mostly dropped on conversion to PDF by the latex compiler.
replies(1): >>46190143 #
4. gbear605 ◴[06 Dec 25 20:57 UTC] No.46176542[source]▶
Browsers already support JavaScript anyway, so why not add another Turing-complete language into the mix? (Not even accounting for CSS technically being Turing-complete, or WASM, or …)
5. fph ◴[07 Dec 25 14:37 UTC] No.46181967[source]▶
As far as I know the Tex team has been working hard lately on supporting accessible "tagged pdfs". Hopefully one day Tex/Latex output will be accessible by default and conversion to HTML will not be needed.
6. ErroneousBosh ◴[08 Dec 25 09:17 UTC] No.46190143{3}[source]▶
Couldn't you write a TeX renderer that emitted HTML (or RST, or Markdown, or whatever) with SVG for the equations?
replies(1): >>46212731 #
7. fooofw ◴[10 Dec 25 00:52 UTC] No.46212731{4}[source]▶
I think this project is based on LaTeXML (https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/) which is exactly that (except for the SVG part)