Ross Moore Macquarie university, Sydney, Australia Play (45min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

This talk will demonstrate recent work done by the author and Han The Thanh, to enrich pdfTeX with the primitives to allow the production of “tagged PDF”. As this is still very much work-in-progress, the talk will concentrate on presenting various aspects of tagging that allow the advantages of tagging to be easily appreciated. These advantages include, but are not limited to:

• substitution of Unicode characters, for glyph combinations from fonts that use encodings other than Unicode, via CMap resources and other techniques;
• alternative text, to be read by screen-readers;
• extraction of text from PDFs in XML format;
• extraction of mathematical content, in MathMLformat.

Each of these aspects will be illustrated by examples constructed using an enhanced version of pdfTeX.

Also, I’ll try to explain the extra complexity of internal PDF structures required for generating properly tagged structure and content. If there is sufficient time, this may be followed by a discussion of the requirements needed to adjust the LaTeX format and packages, to facilitate the automatic production of properly tagged PDF, to become conformant with the ISO–32000–2 standard — also known as PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility, http://pdf.editme.com/PDFUA/). This standard includes MathML tagging of mathematical content; I wish to acknowledge Neil Soiffer (Design Science Inc., http://accessiblemath.dessci.com/) for motivation and much helpful advice, and testing, concerning this aspect.

Nelson Beebe University of Utah, USA Play (45min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

After giving some background and comments on the BIBTeX bibliographic database system, we discuss the problem of searching large collections of such data. We briefly describe how relational databases are structured and queried.

Portable new programs, bibtosql and bibsql, are introduced and their use is illustrated. The first handles the conversion of BIBTeX data to input for three free, popular, and portable, database systems. The second provides a uniform and simple user interface for issuing search queries to any of the supported backend databases.

We finish with a discussion of the contributions of the two late computer scientists to whom this article is dedicated.

Jin-Hwan Cho The University of Suwon, Republic of Korea Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

DVIasm is a TeX utility program that is designed for editing DVI les with three steps: disassembling, editing, and assembling.

The rst stage of DVIasm [1] supported the standard DVI file format as in DVItype and DTL, but in a much more exible way than those utilities. In the second stage [2], DVIasm made it possible to handle two-byte characters, CJK and Unicode characters. The extended DVI formats generated by Omega, Japanese pTeX were all supported, as well as ordinary LaTeX packages with subfont scheme such as CJK-LaTeX and Korean ko.TeX. The final stage of DVIasm confronts the two advanced TeX engines, LuaTeX and XeTeX, both of which can handle OpenType and TrueType les in a direct way without TFM files.

In this talk we introduce DVIasm with a few interesting applications to the TeX world, and discuss how DVIasm handles the extended DVI formats generated by LuaTeX and XeTeX.

[1] Jin-Hwan Cho, Hacking DVI les: Birth of DVIasm, The PracTEX Journal (2007), no. 1, and TUGboat 28 (2007), no. 2, 210{217. http://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb28-2/tb89cho.pdf.

[2] Jin-Hwan Cho, Handling Two-Byte Characters with DVIasm, The Asian Journal of TeX 2 (2008), no. 1, 63–68. http://ajt.ktug.kr/assets/2008/5/1/0201cho.pdf.

Frank Quinn Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

I’ll describe an NSF-funded project to use TeX to produce self-scoring and otherwise interactive PDF documents for educational use. D.P. Story’s AcroTeX Education Bundle already has a great deal of the necessary functionality and will serve as the starting point.

The objective is to produce customized documents — including tests — that are essentially independent of a testing system or other restricted environment. This is needed to make content more portable and less dependent on specic systems. PDF provides satisfactory functionality for the end product. The missing link is a source format that complies to PDF, complete with forms, links, and embedded JavaScript, and that can be written both by software problem generators and (in principle anyway) humans. An enhancement of TeX seems ideal.

Kaveh Bazargan River Valley Technologies Play (40min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

An important advantage of ebook readers is their ability to modify text size and page orientation, for the most comfortable reading conguration. The ebook reader has to reformat the text on the fly and with minimum delay. Current ebook readers (e.g. Stanza on the iPhone) can do this reformatting, but cannot deal with complicated text such as mathematics. We have been experimenting with using TeX as the formatting engine. Of course it can handle complex mathematics, but it also creates the best line breaks of any ebook reader, e.g. Stanza. We will report our experiments with using TeX as an ebook reader on the iPhone.