[Blindmath] pdf intrigue

[Jason White]

Rich Caloggero <rjc at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> Its odd that producing a PDF directly from source gives the worst 
> results. This, to my mind, is the only way to avoid this ligature issue, 
> since the exact text is known beforehand then it should be available for 
> retrieval when the access technology goes to read the PDF.

The PDF specification has a Unicode map which is supposed to identify the
character corresponding to each glyph in the font. This, if implemented by the
application that writes the PDF document, would solve the issue, just as the
PDF structure tree adds logical structure to the PDF document.

My practical solution is this: use tex4ht to generate an HTML document from
the LaTeX. Also, run pdflatex to create a PDF file. Make both available to
your readers; those who have accessibility needs that are not served by the
pDF can read the HTML instead.