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Paula31977027rha5
Participating Frequently
October 16, 2023
Question

Indesign exports wrong reading order in Interactive PDF for Arabic

  • October 16, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 1372 views

Hello community,

I've encountered an issue which I am unable to fix easily. Whenever working with right-to-left languages in InDesign, the reading order is left-to-right in PDF. I have tried everything on the forum to no avail. The only thing that fixed reading order in Acrobat is autotagging, but then I have to correct all accessibility issues all over again.

 

This is a detail of everything I have tried:

 

INDD
- We are using the InDesign that is specific for Middle Eastern Languages
- Paragraph composer is set to "Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer"
- Paragraph direction is set to "Right to Left"
- Ligatures are "On"
- In the parts where there is a mix of English and Arabic, we have manually selected the English text and set the character direction to "Left to Right", then we manually selected all Arabic text and set the  character direction to "Right to Left"
- We set the language to Arabic in the upper panel and also in "Advanced" when exporting the interactive PDF.
 
PDF
- In Menu > Preferences > Language, we set it to "Right to Left" and enabled "Ligatures". Still, when opening the file exported from INDD, the reading order is left to right. Moving tags individually could work, but would be very time-consuming.
- Something new that we tried is opening the PDF, setting the language to Arabic and all options to Right to Left and autotagging the document. This worked in the sense that now the reading order is correct, but this renders lots of accessibility issues.

 

Is there a way to correct this in InDesign? I have talked to many people who are experiencing this issue in RTL languages, and it is really disappointing Adobe is not offering a solution other than manually fixing.

Thank you so much for your input! #accessibility #acrobat #arabic #righttoleft #indesign #adacompliance

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2 replies

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
October 17, 2023

Hi @Paula31977027rha5,

 

Which reading order is not coming out correctly in the PDF? There are 4 ROs in a PDF: See this blog for details https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2020_08-18_ReadingOrder/reading-orders.shtml

 

  • Tag tree RO?
    Try threading your stories into continuous threads as this is the primary way to control the Tag RO. Articles Panel is an option, but has some limitations and doesn't do as well as threading.
  • Order RO (aka architectural/construction order)?
    Control your layers' stacking order. It's bottom up: bottom-most item is read first. And merge down your layers. Multiple layers can often throw off the Order panel's RO.

 

Hope this helps.

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
P
Paula31977027rha5Author
Participating Frequently
October 17, 2023

Hi, Bevi!
Thank you for responding!
When I open the accessibility tags in Acrobat and start navigating through them with the arrow keys, the order it shows is for reading from left to right, and it should be the opposite.
We are using the tags panel and the articles panel in InDesign.
What do you mean by continuous thread and layer stacking order?
I am attaching a PDF and INDD as an example of how we are working.
Thank you so much! 

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
October 19, 2023

Hi Paula @Paula31977027rha5,

quote

When I open the accessibility tags in Acrobat and start navigating through them with the arrow keys, the order it shows is for reading from left to right, and it should be the opposite.

 

Yes, I saw that in your PDF.

I believe that to produce RTL languages, you'll need to use a Middle Eastern version of InDesign, not a regular English, European, or North American version. See: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/arabic-hebrew.html

The ME version has full control for typesetting RTL Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, etc.

 

But I'm not an expert in RTL languages so I hope one of our other experts with RTL experience can chime in on this discussion.

 

quoteWe are using the tags panel and the articles panel in InDesign.

 

On no!

InDesign's Tags Panel is for XML tags. PDF accessibility tags are not the same as XML tags.  Ditch those XML tags and close that panel! It was a method we used 20 years ago before Adobe gave us dedicated accessibility tools.

 

InDesign has several dedicated tools for setting the PDF Export tags: in each style, scroll to the last option on the left Export Tagging.  Ignore the top section of the dialogue because it's for EPUBs. The small bottom section has a small drop-down menu where you designate which tag should be applied to the text when it's exported to PDF.

 

Knowing this, you now understand why using styles is required for accessible PDFs: it's the styles that indicate which tag to put on each paragraph of text—and, of course, the styles also format the text, too.

 

The Articles panel can help, but it has some severe limitations of what it can do to help the RO in the Tags Tree (it doesn't directly affect the regular Order panel).

 

quoteWhat do you mean by continuous thread and layer stacking order?

 

Threading text frames into stories and controlling the stacking order in the Layers panel are basic tasks for any project in InDesign. But they're critical for making an accessible PDF from the layout.

 

There is much more that's needed to make an accessible PDF from InDesign, let alone one that has a form and uses two languages, one LTR and the other RTL. Whew!  Too much to relay in this forum. My regular course is 16 hours of course time!

 

I suggest taking a good course in accessible InDesign. Would love to see you in one of mine (they run every 2-3 months) but there are other options, too.

 

Hope this helps,

—Bevi

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
Joel Cherney
Community Expert
Joel CherneyCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 17, 2023

I really don't know if my suggestions will work, but: 

 

Even though it's some years old, I suggest that you review this thread posted by @Zaid Al Hilali. That's what you should be doing in InDesign; he's used the Articles panel, he's created properly-named styles, and he's mapped those styles to tags, and he's adjusted things in the Layers panel. 

 

Here's another thread addressing reading order in Acrobat with some very informative posts from @Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com that I think would be worth reviewing.  It doesn't directly address the challenges of handling Arabic, but some of the things It does cover, like the Articles panel, and threaded stories, don't show up in your list of things that you've already tried. 

 

Additionally, you don't mention using paragraph styles at all; this is important because

- We set the language to Arabic in the upper panel and also in "Advanced" when exporting the interactive PDF.

This statement by itself doesn't mean a whole lot to us, unfortunately. Language is a character-lever attribute, so selecting "Arabic" in the Control panel doesn't actually mark all of the text as Arabic text. You'd need to have text selected for that dropdown to affect anything. In your shoes, I would make paragraph styles that were defined as Arabic, and had "Default" character direction -- Arabic language marking causes the text to inherit RTL behavior for characters and LTR for numerals. Then you should have an "English" character style with "Default" character direction as well.

 

I suspect that you should ensure that your Stories (Window -> Text -> Story) are also set up RTL. 

 

If you do all those things, then I think that if you check the "Create Tagged PDF" in the Interactive PDF export window, you should maybe wind up with an Arabic PDF with correct reading order. I'm going to try it myself tonight, for what it's worth. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P
Paula31977027rha5Author
Participating Frequently
October 17, 2023

Hi Joel!
Thank you for taking the take to reply to my post!
I haven't used layers or threaded stories, but I will explore this right away.
I will also check how to set stories from RTL.
Regarding paragraph styles, I believe we are using them correctly, but will check that again.
I am attaching an INDD and PDF for you to see how we have set it up.
Thank you so much!

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