Vallaaaris parent
Author here! Resolving one of the most-requested Typst features was definitely a big motivation for me, but I wouldn't say this was the only reason. I've done a lot of previous work on PDF (see e.g. the krilla library, although also mostly in the context of Typst), so I was already pretty familiar with how PDF works. In addition to that, I also just finished writing my master's thesis about 2D rendering (also in Rust), so I also gained a lot of knowledge in that area. Therefore, this project seemed like a good opportunity for me to create a bigger open source project myself that I could work on in my free time. :)
Would it be feasible, with hayro-interpret and krilla, to take an existing PDF and round-trip each of the pages while wrapping the contents in marked content spans and adding tags, to remediate the accessibility of an existing PDF? Round-tripping each of the page content streams through a full-featured PDF interpreter seems cleaner than trying to edit in-place. PDFium can round-trip the content streams and add the marked content spans, but can't do the tagging. What do you think?
Yeah, this is definitely a goal for the future. But there is still quite a bit of work needed in both libraries to make this possible.
Thanks for sharing the background. It's impressive work. Makes me curious about your thesis... Is it publicly available?
Not yet, but it should hopefully be graded in 1-2 weeks and then I can share it!
For posterity: https://github.com/LaurenzV/master-thesis
Impressive work, congrats!
And a job offer I hope!
Thanks for your contribution!