Has anyone had any modicum of success with exporting *high-quality*
tagged PDFs directly from InDesign CS3? My experience thus far seems
to indicate it *requires* substantial manual cleanup using Acrobat.

For example, a table with header rows exports *every* cell (including
header cells) as <TD>, when it should use <TH> for Table Header Cells;
and an InDesign Table of Contents exports as <Story> rather than
<TOC>. If I explicitly apply a <TOC> tag to the table of contents
story the exported PDF is tagged correctly, but if I apply <TOCI> tags
to each item within the TOC story, those applied paragraph tags are
*ignored*. Revisiting the table header row problem, if I explicitly
tag those cells as <TH>, those tags are also *ignored* in the exported
PDF (they remain as <TD>).

In a nutshell, it appears that InDesign CS3's Export to Tagged PDF
*only* uses tags which have been applied to *frames* and not to text
content *within* a frame. And *only* those paragraphs whose name
exactly match standard PDF Tag names (such as H1...H6; see <http://tinyurl.com/4bh92d
> for a complete list) are properly tagged in the exported PDF.

Are these observations accurate? Or am I simply missing something in
how I prepare my InDesign documents? Or is this simply a lost cause
and I should instead attempt to automate the cleanup with Acrobat?

ciao,
Caleb

my vendor has reported no problems with the high-quality tagged PDFs I
send them.... fwiw... however, we're not doing too much detail in the
tagging and not fussing too much. I think, and when they extract xml
from the PDF, they expect to do some clean up. At anyrate, CS3 is
generating high-quality tagged PDFs that work perfectly for me.

did this help you at all?

I don't use table cells by the way, I have hundred's of tables, but a
very simple and tight format that cells cannot work with. I just
convert to text, apply some paragraph styles and fuss a bit with the
tab spaces. Generally a very good work-flow. So any tagging problems
with tables just doesn't apply to me.

I had a problem a few months ago with the vender and the hqt-PDFs that
this list helped me solved, it was about spaces apearing or
disappearing when the xml was extracted from the hqt-PDF. To make a
long story short, ultimately I had to make sure that no subsetting was
going on, I don't know why. But the style I ended up creating for the
export has subsetting set to zero.

and now I'm going to go hide again, but I hope this helped?

Rachel


On May 21, 2008, at 9:56 PM, Caleb Clauset wrote:

> Has anyone had any modicum of success with exporting *high-quality*
> tagged PDFs directly from InDesign CS3? My experience thus far seems
> to indicate it *requires* substantial manual cleanup using Acrobat.
>
> For example, a table with header rows exports *every* cell
> (including header cells) as <TD>, when it should use <TH> for Table
> Header Cells; and an InDesign Table of Contents exports as <Story>
> rather than <TOC>. If I explicitly apply a <TOC> tag to the table of
> contents story the exported PDF is tagged correctly, but if I apply
> <TOCI> tags to each item within the TOC story, those applied
> paragraph tags are *ignored*. Revisiting the table header row
> problem, if I explicitly tag those cells as <TH>, those tags are
> also *ignored* in the exported PDF (they remain as <TD>).
>
> In a nutshell, it appears that InDesign CS3's Export to Tagged PDF
> *only* uses tags which have been applied to *frames* and not to text
> content *within* a frame. And *only* those paragraphs whose name
> exactly match standard PDF Tag names (such as H1...H6; see <http://tinyurl.com/4bh92d
> > for a complete list) are properly tagged in the exported PDF.
>
> Are these observations accurate? Or am I simply missing something in
> how I prepare my InDesign documents? Or is this simply a lost cause
> and I should instead attempt to automate the cleanup with Acrobat?
>
> ciao,
> Caleb
>
>
>
> --
>

Rachel A. Russell
Managing Editor, American Mineralogist
3635 Concorde Parkway Ste 500
Chantilly, VA 20151-1125
PHONE: 703 652 9955
FAX: 703 652 9951

http://www.minsocam.org
and
GeoScienceWorld at http://ammin.geoscienceworld.org

Permission & membership info http://www.minsocam.org/MSA/
Permission.html or 703 652 9950

Hm... My hope was to leverage the structure defined natively within
InDesign CS3 to directly export high quality (as in the tagging
quality) Tagged PDFs *without* having to re-apply/cleanup the
structure outside using Acrobat or some other external tool.

What's really frustrating is that Microsoft Word has the ability (via
PDF Maker) to produce *better* (more accessible) Tagged PDFs than
Adobe InDesign. One can only hope that future versions will better
integrate the XML tagging structure with exporting Tagged PDFs.

On May 22, 2008, at 10:18 AM, Rachel Russell wrote:

> my vendor has reported no problems with the high-quality tagged PDFs
> I send them.... fwiw... however, we're not doing too much detail in
> the tagging and not fussing too much. I think, and when they extract
> xml from the PDF, they expect to do some clean up. At anyrate, CS3
> is generating high-quality tagged PDFs that work perfectly for me.
>
> did this help you at all?
>
> I don't use table cells by the way, I have hundred's of tables, but
> a very simple and tight format that cells cannot work with. I just
> convert to text, apply some paragraph styles and fuss a bit with the
> tab spaces. Generally a very good work-flow. So any tagging problems
> with tables just doesn't apply to me.
>
> I had a problem a few months ago with the vender and the hqt-PDFs
> that this list helped me solved, it was about spaces apearing or
> disappearing when the xml was extracted from the hqt-PDF. To make a
> long story short, ultimately I had to make sure that no subsetting
> was going on, I don't know why. But the style I ended up creating
> for the export has subsetting set to zero.
>
> and now I'm going to go hide again, but I hope this helped?
>
> Rachel
>
>
> On May 21, 2008, at 9:56 PM, Caleb Clauset wrote:
>
>> Has anyone had any modicum of success with exporting *high-quality*
>> tagged PDFs directly from InDesign CS3? My experience thus far
>> seems to indicate it *requires* substantial manual cleanup using
>> Acrobat.
>>
>> For example, a table with header rows exports *every* cell
>> (including header cells) as <TD>, when it should use <TH> for Table
>> Header Cells; and an InDesign Table of Contents exports as <Story>
>> rather than <TOC>. If I explicitly apply a <TOC> tag to the table
>> of contents story the exported PDF is tagged correctly, but if I
>> apply <TOCI> tags to each item within the TOC story, those applied
>> paragraph tags are *ignored*. Revisiting the table header row
>> problem, if I explicitly tag those cells as <TH>, those tags are
>> also *ignored* in the exported PDF (they remain as <TD>).
>>
>> In a nutshell, it appears that InDesign CS3's Export to Tagged PDF
>> *only* uses tags which have been applied to *frames* and not to
>> text content *within* a frame. And *only* those paragraphs whose
>> name exactly match standard PDF Tag names (such as H1...H6; see <http://tinyurl.com/4bh92d
>> > for a complete list) are properly tagged in the exported PDF.
>>
>> Are these observations accurate? Or am I simply missing something
>> in how I prepare my InDesign documents? Or is this simply a lost
>> cause and I should instead attempt to automate the cleanup with
>> Acrobat?
>>
>> ciao,
>> Caleb
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>
> Rachel A. Russell
> Managing Editor, American Mineralogist
> 3635 Concorde Parkway Ste 500
> Chantilly, VA 20151-1125
> PHONE: 703 652 9955
> FAX: 703 652 9951
>
> http://www.minsocam.org
> and
> GeoScienceWorld at http://ammin.geoscienceworld.org
>
> Permission & membership info http://www.minsocam.org/MSA/Permission.html
> or 703 652 9950

On May 21, 2008, at 9:56 PM, Caleb Clauset wrote:

> In a nutshell, it appears that InDesign CS3's Export to Tagged PDF
> *only* uses tags which have been applied to *frames* and not to text
> content *within* a frame. And *only* those paragraphs whose name
> exactly match standard PDF Tag names (such as H1...H6; see <http://tinyurl.com/4bh92d
> > for a complete list) are properly tagged in the exported PDF.
>
> Are these observations accurate? Or am I simply missing something in
> how I prepare my InDesign documents? Or is this simply a lost cause
> and I should instead attempt to automate the cleanup with Acrobat?


It appears that I was very much "missing something" in that I
*completely* overlooked the Role Map (choose Options > Edit Role Map
in the Acrobat Tags tabs), which *is* populated during InDesign's
Export to Tagged PDF using any applied tags (such as InDesign's Map
Styles to Tags option). This new understanding of the Role Map means
there should only be *minor* cleanup to tables and lists within Acrobat.

On May 22, 2008, at 7:56 PM, Caleb Clauset wrote:

> What's really frustrating is that Microsoft Word has the ability
> (via PDF Maker) to produce *better* (more accessible) Tagged PDFs
> than Adobe InDesign. One can only hope that future versions will
> better integrate the XML tagging structure with exporting Tagged PDFs.

Wow, I definitely missed the boat here... Part of my mistaken
impression of the above was finding several mentions via Google to PDF
Maker's use of the Role Map to remap of Word's paragraph styles to PDF
Tags. AFAICT, this relationship between InDesign's Tags and the PDF
Role Map isn't documented in Help.

ciao,
Caleb