RE: 2.4 Proposed Modules - gpdf

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Thu, 2003-05-01 at 17:07, Owen Taylor wrote:
... 
> > I think the issue is with the formmat, namely that PS and PDF store lit-
> > tle (or no) structural information (eg, PS stores the position of indi-
> > vidual letters IIRC, but not the relationship between those letters).

Postscript is 99% garbage accessibility-wise, not much hope there.

PDF 1.4 has accessibility stuff *but*

> There's quite a large amount of the PDF-1.4 spec related to trying
> to make the contents accessible. Whether 
> 
>  A) It is done in a useful manner

* lots of argument over whether the PDF-1.4 accessibility stuff is
actually accessible

* only adobe content creators on Windows and I think MSOffice implement
the support for writing the accessibility info

>  B) Any content generators implement it

see above.  In theory I guess it could be added to pdflib or whatever -
but IIRC Thos Merz of pdflib, though well versed in accessibility, has
not seen fit to implement this support in pdflib, perhaps because he
considers it too conceptually flawed.

But PDF is a very common format, and lots of places using the Adobe and
Word content creators are at least attempting to create accessible
content that way.

There's a problem though, in that the accessibility stuff in PDF 1.4
isn't well-connected to the viewer's data, etc. etc. so doing this in a
really useful way for a pdf viewer would require a "smart canvas" rather
than just a text-extractor or structured-content-extractor.  I think
it's possible with gpdf but it would take some work; it's not just lying
there in the format waiting to be extracted, it needs context info from
the viewing application/library to really work correctly (for instance,
to work with focus tracking magnifiers, etc.).

- Bill

> Is something that I don't know.
> 
> Regards,
>                                          Owen
> a
> 
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