The LaTeX Project have been working for about 4 years now on creation of automatically tagged PDFs from (more-or-less) unmodified LaTeX documents. We’ve been reporting regularly in LaTeX News, and things are moving forward nicely.

We (Frank, Ulrike and I) went to the recent DocEng 2024 conference in San José. Ulrike presented a workshop showing what is doable right now with the updated code. At present, this is still an opt-in testphase, but most of the time

\DocumentMetadata{testphase = {phase-III,firstaid,math,table,title}}

is enough to use it. As you can probably tell, this uses the current (phase III) code plus add-ons for maths, tables and titles: that is all a bit more experimental but is worth exploring.

We are building up an idea of which packages and classes work out-of-the-box with the latest code: you can view the current list online. It’s amazing how many packages already work, but of course there is work to do. I’ve got some adjustments to make for siunitx, but as the tagging structures are still not finalised, I’m waiting a bit. We also need to look at performance: tagging takes time, but when we make it opt-out we need it to be as fast as possible.

On the to-do list here is beamer: a complex class with a lot of challenges! I think that deserves it’s own post, so I’ll return to that soon in a dedicated post.

But for day-to-day use, I’m finding tagging something I can mainly switch on and just use. So other than slides, all of my LaTeX work is now tagged - may not perfectly just yet, but each release getting better and better.