# alternatives to the concept of a page, Gutenberg press vs LCD screen

Brian Dunn bd at bdtechconcepts.com
Fri Aug 30 05:17:58 CEST 2019

On Fri, 30 Aug 2019 00:56:27 +0200
Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:

>
> The limitations of current hardware lead to huge fonts and thus very
> few words per line.  What I've seen so far looked like typeset with
> Microsoft Word and hyphenation turned off.  I've never seen math
> formulas yet but suppose that they aren't supported properly either.

MathML has some support.  MathJax might be used instead.  SVG images
work pretty well, and LaTeX code can be embedded in ALT tags.
Nevertheless, imagine a formula which takes a full line on a printed
page being forced to fit on a small e-reader. Reflow, shrink, or pan?

> All this doesn't mean that content markup isn't important.  It's at
> least required in order to support visually impaired readers and I
> think that TeX still lags behind in this area.

Experimental packages include accsupp and axessibility.  For the lwarp
package (LaTeX to HTML), I've introduced an ALT key for
\includegraphics, and the next version will introduce \ThisAltTag for
custom one-off tags. SVG math and some chemistry have the LaTeX
expression included as an ALT tag, unless it's a complicated nasty
thing in which case it can be set to a generic default.

Brian

--
Brian Dunn
BD Tech Concepts LLC
http://www.BDTechConcepts.com