Automatically extract footnotes from p-tags
in PDF – Accessibility

Question

I exported a PDF from InDesign that needs to be digitally accessible. The problem is that Adobe InDesign places all footnotes (note) in a p-tag (p). You can, of course, manually extract the footnotes from the p-tag in Acrobat. But it's a document with almost 100 footnotes, so that would be a lot of manual work.

Is there a way to do this automatically? For example, with a (preflight) script? I hope so 😉

creative explorer · Answer

@ideaism You are correct: InDesign's default behavior for footnotes is to wrap the entire note, including the reference number, in a single

tag, which fails accessibility standards for screen readers. Unfortunately, there is no single, automatic, built-in feature or standard Preflight fix in Adobe Acrobat Pro that will automatically detect and change the tag structure of a footnote from a single

tag to the required nested tags (like a tag containing a ). While not a simple Preflight, you could try the Action Wizard with Acrobat

Automatically extract footnotes <note> from p-tags <p> in PDF – Accessibility

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