elf: Quote: She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain (Fond of Books)
elf ([personal profile] elf) wrote in [personal profile] amalthia 2010-08-29 04:16 pm (UTC)

Tagging

...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.

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
(will be screened if not validated)
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

If you are unable to use this captcha for any reason, please contact us by email at support@dreamwidth.org