Re: [orca-list] a suggestion to solve pdf reading with orca.

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 01:36:08AM +0530, Krishnakant Mane wrote:
> poppler utils already has pdf to html (without the spaces ).
> and it will not be difficult to integrate it.

One problem with it, though, is that it doesn't support tagged PDF. We need a
tool that can take advantage of the structure tree in tagged PDF documents.

The Gnu PDF project (http://www.gnupdf.org/) is supposed to implement the
whole of the PDF ISO standard. I think this work would benefit from
contributions by people who are interested in the accessibility-related parts
of the PDF specification, including tagged PDF. I don't have time to
contribute at the moment, but there seem to be others on the list who are
interested and who could take the initiative here.
> Today we all know that latex with its classes like beamer have
> excelent presentation generating capability.
> As a side note, I often get very nice comments and overvelming
> amaisment from people who see my presentations which I create using
> latex and then convert it to pdf for a slide show.

LaTeX is the one and only reason why I haven't touched a word processor in
more than ten years. I have also received favourable comments regarding the
typeset quality of documents that I have written using LaTeX.
> Latex is some thing which can give blind people a reputation of "they
> can really make professional quality, richly formatted and well
> structured reports or presentation ".

I agree, and it's still the only tool that can handle a wide variety of
languages, phonetic transcriptions used in linguistics, mathematics, music
etc., all in a highly accessible textual format.
> Now talking about a pygtk based pdf reader will have one advantage
> that we will be able ot read the pdf files.
> But evince has a wonderful presentation mode which leaves me even more
> wanting for accessibility in evince.

This might be possible, but it might also be easier to build on top of GNU PDF
when it matures. GNU PDF is sure to be the basis of a PDF reader, since it
will support the format much more fully than any of the existing libraries
(such as Ghostscript and XPDF), which existing readers rely on.

Evince, for example, uses Poppler, which is a version of XPDF.