...adding tags to the PDF. I don't know how to do this personally.
Conversion--not printing, but conversion--from Word 2003 or later will automatically tag the PDF. People who have Acrobat Pro (or possibly Acrobat Standard) instead of the free reader program can use the "Advanced--> Accessibility--> Add tags to document" feature, which works on most documents but occasionally fails due to bizarre font encodings. (There are some professional ebooks I can't tag.)
Books converted from InDesign are not automatically tagged; I don't know if this is an available option. Books converted by third-party software (PDFWriter and such) are almost never tagged.
Manual tagging is possible, but nightmarish. I say this as a person who loves line-by-line proofreading. It's like line-by-line proofreading, with an annoying UI and complex program options that aren't described anywhere. Oh, and if you do too many things without saving, Acrobat will crash & lose all your work. (Acrobat's instructions about tagging are "here's the dropdown; click 'yes' to continue.")
Tagging has two purposes: 1) If it works well, it allows much better reflow; it avoids those broken-line problems. (Often does not work that way for double-spaced docs; the auto-tag reads each line as a separate paragraph, and manual fixing is, erm, nightmarish. Would have to be done for every single line in the book.)
2) Allowing read-aloud programs to read the text properly. Again, it helps if the auto-tagging is done right, but the "each line is a paragraph" thing is probably less disruptive to this function than to reflow.
Purpose #2 is fairly irrelevant for novels (I believe the read-aloud programs will work on untagged documents; they just aren't as clear about things like chapter breaks); it can be important for charts & tables that need to be read in the right order. Also, tagging allows you to add alt text to images.
Tagging
Conversion--not printing, but conversion--from Word 2003 or later will automatically tag the PDF. People who have Acrobat Pro (or possibly Acrobat Standard) instead of the free reader program can use the "Advanced--> Accessibility--> Add tags to document" feature, which works on most documents but occasionally fails due to bizarre font encodings. (There are some professional ebooks I can't tag.)
Books converted from InDesign are not automatically tagged; I don't know if this is an available option. Books converted by third-party software (PDFWriter and such) are almost never tagged.
Manual tagging is possible, but nightmarish. I say this as a person who loves line-by-line proofreading. It's like line-by-line proofreading, with an annoying UI and complex program options that aren't described anywhere. Oh, and if you do too many things without saving, Acrobat will crash & lose all your work. (Acrobat's instructions about tagging are "here's the dropdown; click 'yes' to continue.")
Tagging has two purposes:
1) If it works well, it allows much better reflow; it avoids those broken-line problems. (Often does not work that way for double-spaced docs; the auto-tag reads each line as a separate paragraph, and manual fixing is, erm, nightmarish. Would have to be done for every single line in the book.)
2) Allowing read-aloud programs to read the text properly. Again, it helps if the auto-tagging is done right, but the "each line is a paragraph" thing is probably less disruptive to this function than to reflow.
Purpose #2 is fairly irrelevant for novels (I believe the read-aloud programs will work on untagged documents; they just aren't as clear about things like chapter breaks); it can be important for charts & tables that need to be read in the right order. Also, tagging allows you to add alt text to images.