picture by Markus Kohz

Frank Mittelbach graduated from Johannes Gutenberg University (Dipl. Math.) and then began his career in the IT industry at Electronic Data Systems (EDS), later moving to Hewlett‑Packard (HP).

Until the end of 2015 he worked as Lead Architect for WW ESM (Worldwide Enterprise Service Management) in the ES Management organization of HP, where he designed and developed tools and data models for escalation, configuration, and request management, improving the quality and effectiveness of work in the leveraged environment.

In parallel to his industry career, Frank has pursued research in document engineering, focusing on the automation of typesetting, multilingual document design, and related topics. He is the series editor for Addison‑Wesley’s Tools and Techniques in Computer Typesetting and has written and co‑authored several books in this field. He has also been an invited speaker at a number of international conferences on these subjects.

Since 1990 he has led the worldwide development and maintenance of the LaTeX typesetting system, the de‑facto standard in STEM disciplines with millions of users worldwide.

In 2016 Frank left his position in the IT industry to focus entirely on computer typesetting research and Open Source software development—especially on the future development of the LaTeX system and its transition to a framework that can automatically produce accessible STEM documents without the need for post‑process remediation.

Abstract

The lecture will briefly describe the creation of books and other documents over the last few centuries, and then use concrete examples to illustrate the influence and significance of the TeX typography system for modern computer typesetting and document production.

Over the last forty years, TeX in its LaTeX form—originally devised by Leslie Lamport—has established itself as a standard in mathematics, computer science, and the natural sciences and is used by millions of people worldwide.

Drawing on ideas from Gutenberg, Knuth, and Zapf, it also produces documents in traditional text typesetting with a quality that is not matched, or only partially matched, by other methods, and it therefore enjoys a growing fan base among those who appreciate beautifully typeset books.

However, until recently its focus was on perfect print quality alone, and the semantic structure of the document was not preserved—except through visual cues—in its PDF output. As a result, STEM documents produced with LaTeX (or any other tool, for that matter) remained largely inaccessible to users with accessibility needs.

Starting in 2020, LaTeX has been gradually redesigned and is now capable of automatically generating accessible STEM documents, enabling users with accessibility needs to participate as first‑class citizens in academic discourse for the first time.