Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX [LWN.net]

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 0:28 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

Readers of this article might be interested that work on LaTeX is ongoing. This is not a decades old dying project as some of the comments might make you believe - who report of problems that happened 25 years ago.

Just in the last few years, a major undertaking starts to produce tangible results: LaTeX Tagged PDF https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/
This is bound to be incorporated into the next TeX-Live release and thus will appear in all major Linux distributions in due course.

With it, one can prepare barrier free PDFs with acceptable effort - *even for math*. I don't know if any other system that provides this level of capability. This is the stuff that gets developed in established FOSS ecosystems by people who work on typesetting systems since decades.

Disclaimer: I'm personally involved in the LaTeX project, though I'm not a developer any more.

to post comments

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 2:46 UTC (Fri) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (9 responses)

> Just in the last few years, a major undertaking starts to produce tangible results: LaTeX Tagged PDF https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project
> This is bound to be incorporated into the next TeX-Live release and thus will appear in all major Linux distributions in due course.

How does this help with UX of *writing* in LaTeX, which seems to be the major issue driving the competing developments (and specifically the subject of the article)?

<...>

I understand that LaTeX is something you relate to, but your response reads somewhat like this:

- Project A sucks at ABC, and I'm badly tired of it, so I don't wish to use project A anymore. I'm looking forward to possible replacements.
- But project A is the best at XYZ, so this proves we are better than project B!

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 9:52 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

AOL.

This seems to be a major blinker problem in FOSS. My brother's comments about his experience of Emacs at Uni 40 years ago are classic - when he first started he thought it was awful, impossible to use, way too complicated. Then after a year or two, once he'd mastered it, he couldn't imagine using anything else.

The reason Word conquered the world (and the reason I hate it) is because it was aimed at people who COULDN'T TYPE - the managerial guys who had professional typists, the couch potatoes who didn't do much, etc etc. WordPerfect - which I took to like a duck to water because it (on the surface) mimicked a typewriter - which failed in large part due to MS's dirty tricks - couldn't compete in the battle for the minds of the people with the purse strings, even though it was a much better professional solution.

FLOSS so often is such a super swiss army knife that anybody new approaching it is left thinking "but how does it fix MY problem ???". I use lilypond, and it's incredibly powerful, but the learning curve to access that power is almost impenetrable (it's driven by a variant of Lisp!).

Cheers,
Wol

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 10:55 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (7 responses)

Your attention is drawn to https://www.overleaf.com/

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 11:21 UTC (Fri) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link] (6 responses)

Any particular reason? Using Overleaf is a distinctly worse experience than using a locally installed LaTeX with your favorite editor, Git, Rsync, etc. Although not as convenient for this as Typst, LaTeX can be set up to provide a live preview (but it will lag behind “live” when your document swells, as LaTeX lacks Typst’s incremental compilation).

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 12:41 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

In response to:

> the learning curve to access that power is almost impenetrable

One of my pet cliches is: "Everything is easy, when you know how to do it."

Overleaf provides a gentle introduction to LaTeX.

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 13:17 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

Lyx has very good inline live preview support for Math. It's just 'compiling' the math snippet itself (with whatever environments/packages the doc is using) so it's near instant.

I'm a big fan of Lyx as a great accessible and fairly user-friendly UI for writing documents to eventually typeset with LaTeX. I've used it for my own dissertation and it made writing so much easier. It's also customisable. I ended up making a few of my own definitions for things, with their own menu entries - which was just a matter of adding some UI definition files.

My father went to uni after retirement and (eventually) got a masters. He used to have endless issues with his masters dissertation in MS Word, with the format going screw and *especially* the required citations being very hard to manage and constantly getting messed up. I was constantly having to go over to him to try help him with his MS Word processing issues. In the end, I switched him over to Lyx. Showed him how to make chapters, sections and sub-sections, and insert citations. Told him just to write, and that the formatting would largely take care of itself. I helped with proofing at the end and help with inserting figures and illustrations, but it saved *both of us* a lot of hair-pulling and time.

My dad generally does not get on with computers. He gets very frustrated with complex programmes, with states affecting things he can't see/understand. He became a big of fan Lyx however, for the way it just let him write and generally staying out of the way, while keeping track of all the citations and layout for him, and producing a beautiful doc at the end thanks to LaTeX.

Lyx is a _great_ bit of software!

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 27, 2025 11:19 UTC (Mon) by quietbritishjim (subscriber, #114117) [Link] (2 responses)

Another vote for LyX. As you say, the live preview of equations are very good. It feels essentially like you're just editing the PDF directly.

For that reason, I honestly think LyX is good even for advanced LaTeX users, despite often being pitched (dismissively) at beginners. It has a few "escape hatches" to raw LaTeX for anything not natively supported by LaTeX. I started using LyX after a decade use LaTeX and found it was much faster write in (by a factor of 3 in the one course I half-wrote in LaTeX then re-wrote in LyX) and unbeatable for editing an almost complete document (like my PhD thesis!). It does have potential for a bit of a competency gap though, where you might struggle if you've only ever used LyX then need an advanced LaTeX feature having not learnt the basics.

Perhaps if Typst really takes off then someone will make a LyX-like editor for it. (Maybe even me, one day!)

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 28, 2025 10:43 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

> I honestly think LyX is good even for advanced LaTeX users

Yes, it's excellent even if you're an advanced LaTeX user. Lyx will always let you "bug out" to the "Evil Red Text" (ERT) box and just write LaTeX if you want. I did a dissertation in Lyx that had a good bit of custom LaTeX macros, to use in math boxes, and other stuff. Indeed, you can easily *extend Lyx itself* and add support for your own macros in the menu system with just a small little text definition file - so even my own macros had Lyx support. ;)

It's an amazing tool Lyx.

There is extensive documentation, from a tutorial to a reference. Which is of course written in Lyx, so you can see exactly how it's done things. :) I.e., there is both a description of how to do something and there is the thing itself in Lyx, in the doc. ;)

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Oct 28, 2025 11:17 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Oh, another great feature of Lyx, which makes it such a _huge_ time-saver for writing LaTeX no matter how advanced you are:

You can include all kinds of graphics into your document, and Lyx knows to auto-convert many many formats into something LaTeX can use, if it isn't already such a format. If there's a format it doesn't know, you can just add your own auto-conversion command into the settings. So I was able to just insert Dia diagrammes into my Lyx document, and *Lyx would just convert it to SVG and be able to display my diagramme in the screen*.

If writing raw latex you have to remember to do this all yourself, whether that's manual and remembering to update your SVGs whenever you update a source diagramme file; or writing a makefile.

Also, Lyx makes the "tweak image size-specification relative to page/column/box, and tweak placement, compile, check, adjust" cycle so much faster.

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 27, 2025 19:46 UTC (Sat) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

Using overleaf has a unique advantage when you have a group of collaborators that use different OSs and have installed LaTeX using different approaches (e.g. one on Windows with MikTeX, another one on Linux with TeXLive, another one on Linux with distribution provided packages). It gives you a platforms that can be used as a reference: if the doc compiles fine there and it does not compile fine for a subset of the collaborators, it is easy to convince them that the issue is on their side.

A pain point is that the free tier is insufficient even for the simplest document with the LuaLaTeX engine.

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 19, 2025 19:04 UTC (Fri) by notriddle (subscriber, #130608) [Link] (1 responses)

If Typst manages to steal mindshare from LaTeX, I doubt it'll have much to do with tagged pdf or other niche features. It'll happen because, if I forget a closing brace, pdflatex does this:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.24 (TeX Live 2022/Debian) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./t.latex
LaTeX2e <2022-11-01> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2023-01-16>
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2022/07/02 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size12.clo))
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-pdftex.def)
(./t.aux))
Runaway argument?
{ripe and green) \end {enumerate} \end {document} \par 
! File ended while scanning use of \emph .
<inserted text>
                \par 
<*> t.latex
           
?

And Typst does this:

error: unclosed delimiter
   ┌─ t.typst:14:12
   │
14 │ + #underline[Good gin  
   |             ^

In TeX's defense, it's not the worst system I've ever dealt with, and a lot of that spew can be cleaned up by just putting it behind a --verbose flag, but the biggest, hardest-to-fix problem is here:

{ripe and green) \end {enumerate} \end {document} \par

Typest's equivalent has a line number. It also actually matches what was written. Is that fixable without breaking changes to the macro system?

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 22, 2025 18:49 UTC (Mon) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

You chose to use the one example of an error message that comes without a line number.

In all other error messages TeX's error messages consist of two lines. The first line has the line number and all characters that are read up to the error, the second line has the characters that are still to be processed.

But that is actually a bynote. You wrote

> tagged pdf or other niche features

Since journals (especial scientific journals that Lee wrote about) and other publishers increasingly demand the production of barrier free PDFs for online publication, Tagged PDF is not a niche feature, IMNSHO. Customers of mine currently pour 6-digit numbers of Euro in creation of such files. For private production it doesn't matter -- but for publication, it will soon be a must-have.

Fully Tagged PDF (even for math) is in the works for LaTeX

Posted Sep 27, 2025 9:11 UTC (Sat) by Delio (guest, #179554) [Link]

Tagged PDF is the focus of the next Typst release (0.14) which is due very soon.