EN in first answer.
Die #DANTE2025 startet an der Hochschule Darmstadt.
Der Löwe und ich sind startklar gespannt auf die Diskussionen. Vermutlich wieder viel zu tagging und Barrierefreiheit.
Gestern beim Vorabendtreff haben wir schon festgestellt, dass alle hier noch viel zu viel Dinge getan haben wollten… aber leider hat der Tag nur 24h … aber wir bleiben dran.
Unter diesem Toot versuche ich wieder etwas die Vorträge zusammenzufassen.
#DANTE2025 is starting at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt.
Mr. Lion and me are extremly curious about discussions and expecting a boost concerning tagging and accesibility of #TeXLaTeX.
We already realized yesterday, that there is too little time for all the projects we are working on… but … we are all trying our best.
I will try to sum up the talks below this.
Ulrike Fischer started presenting a summary of the #TeXLaTeX News #ltnews (you always find those calling texdoc ltnews).
Short teaser on sockets and plugs, there will be a separate talk about this afterwards.
Some details:
- lualatex-dev now allows using * as it's used in enumitem to reference the \@currentcounter. Will be included in the next release.
- Some warning about cleveref as this is no longer maintained and currently not compatible to the kernels new implementation of references
General request for additional testing especially concerning #a11y and #PDFtagging
There now is a website which can be used to test your PDF concerning tagging:
https://texlive.net/showtags
Additionally there is one using texlive.net + ngpdf to extract html of the tagging. Sponsored by #DanteEV https://texlive.net/ngpdf
- Luamml which extracts #MathML from #TeXLaTeX and is using this for more accesible math is now part of the Kernel. If you do a lot math typesetting, please consider to try it
- The xbeamer project is providing a draft concerning more general options to use tagging within #beamer presentations https://github.com/josephwright/xbeamer
Most of the Work of the #TeXLaTeX team is pushing accessibility. But there is still a lot to do.
Ulrike and Frank both mention issues which are not covered by the #PDF Standard
Frank Mittelbach is next presenting an updated and extended version of the talk about sockets & plugs presented at #TUG2024.
Roughly those concepts are similar to the hook management providing addition interfaces to change and/or extend commands and structures.
He requests #TeXLaTeX developers to use these machanisms instead of redefinitions but also mentions that there are a lot already doing so.
During the coffee break Mr. Lion and his friend Bär again received some presents by the amazing @samcarter
Thanks a lot!
They all lined up for a group photo. So probably we have to make some #TikzLing and lion cookies soonish.
So in case you need another reason to attend the next conference we travel … We can talk about some cookies … ;-)
Afterwards Adelheid Bonnetsmüller is – once again – presenting a TeX related but also some kind of real-world inspired topic.
This time it's about Rubiks Cubes. She brought a bunch of different shapes and sizes which will probably catch a few of us in the next coffee break.
The connection to #TeXLaTeX is created showing packages which can be used to illustrate solving algorithms and also also includes scripts for solving after someone encoded their cube to be used by the package.
I lost myself in a bunch of discussions yesterday, so … sorry for the delay …
Yesterday afternoon started with 2 presentations out of the #CTAN team. Manfred Lotz showed a bunch of statistics and described the work of the Upload-Management-Team as well as some historic overview.
Afterwards Erik Braun roughly explained the technical infrastructure and changes of last year to cleanup the historically grown server blob. A lot of stuff was improved but there still is a lot of work left and #CTAN is once again asking for volunteers.
So in case you have too much free time or always wanted to clean up, automate or document old infrastructure… You are welcome to join them!
(And I always offer cookies when uploading a package update… you can take those!)
[1/3] #DANTE2025 Friday starts with “Storytelling with Frank [Mittelbach]”. He admits that it took a while for himself to realize how bad we treated users relying on assisting technology like screen readers! He tries to give a rough overview of this impression by playing screen reader recordings of an untagged document compared to the work the tagging-project did so far. The examples can be found at https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/documentation/wtpdf/fulldoc
[2/3] This illustrates the current status and the LaTeX-Team are keeping the examples updated.
He also described the difficultities with different pdf viewers, and why there currently is the requirement to add MathML as well as alt-text for math, as readers don't support both variants atm. Foxit soon will be able to do both. Hopefully others will follow.
[3/3]
One aspect I find extremly important about his presentation is him explaining the learnings he concerning accessability awareness and how important it is to talk to lots of users relying on the technology when making decisions which will impact their way of using it.
I hope the rest of the audience will use this to start at least thinking how important it is to create well structured documents instead of beautiful blobs.
[1/2] Second talk of Friday also focused on accessibility. Ulrike Fischer presented different methods to convert #TeXLaTeX to #HTML.
She presented #tex4ht, #pandoc, #LaTeXML, #lwarp and the workflow using #NGPDF (create #HTML out of #TaggedPDF) and compared their features.
Most important difference is that LaTeXML and Pandoc don't directly process TeX, but use the Code to extract the structure. Depending on the complexity of the document one way or another may be the better choice.
#DANTE2025
Marei