[xworld21]

The article talks about converting LaTeX to HTML, which is feasible today, if only buggy and fragile. This is the textbook the author talks about, which is written in LaTeX (but compiled with LaTeXML instead of pdflatex): https://forallx.openlogicproject.org/html/

[oh_my_goodness]

It does. But why can't LaTex produce png or something? Why does it have to be either pdf or pretty much abandon the idea of typesetting? Or am I misunderstanding?

[raegis]

By the way, LaTeX and TeX existed long before PDFs were ubiquitous. A common workflow in the 1990s and prior was

TeX/LaTeX -> DVI -> PostScript -> printer

And DVI stands for "device independent", so the idea was you can take a DVI and convert it to any format. PDFs just eventually became the dominate format.

[oh_my_goodness]

Yeah, I remember.

[goosedragons]

You can. Compile to DVI then use dvipng. There's not much reason to do it anymore. PDFs take up less space, you can copy the text, do hyperlinks.

[xworld21]

> Compile to DVI then use dvipng

or dvisvgm, which will produce scalable images. However, images are even worse than PDF in terms of accessibility, which is what the article is talking about.

[oh_my_goodness]

So what's so bad about pdfs?

[xworld21]

Even after properly tagging your PDF and using Acrobat Reader to reflow the text, you cannot achieve this level of flexibility: https://forallx.openlogicproject.org/html/

Note how Richard's book adapts to any screen size, can change fonts and color schemes, system settings such as 'high contrast' will affect the rendering of the page, and you could even use browser extensions to restyle the page to e.g. use a more dyslexic friendly font of your choice.

This kind of functionality is not afforded by Adobe Reader. Even the official Adobe's example of reflowing that was posted in another thread is quite bad: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow... The reflowed PDF is just stacking all text and removing all non-text visual cues. For example, pairs of name/role are separated by whitespace in the PDF, but after reflowing they are undisguishable from each other (who would be the senior VP, Sunny or Daniel?). In HTML, reflowing would preserve semantically relevant whitespace out of the box.

[CJefferson]

Some people like text which they can reformat easily (increase font size, change to different screens dimensions).

What is generally bad about the PDFs that Latex produces (and is a problem with latex, not a problem with PDF) is that they are very inaccessible, they don't work with screen readers.

The reason it's so hard to make latex output HTML (although people are working on it) is that latex is actually a programming language, which is executed to decide where things go on in the PDF.

Make latex output HTML is a bit like trying to take (say) a game engine like Unity, and change it's rendering engine to output HTML instead of graphics -- in the worst case it's basically impossible, as the game just generates commands like "draw triangle here", without context or semantics.