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makaylah_6533
makaylah_6533
Participant
July 30, 2026
Answered

Changing reading order rotates text 180 and makes it HUGE

  • July 30, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 57 views

I am remediating PDFs for accessibility to be put on a local government website. The design/PDFs were made using Canva by another department. When I change the reading order in the doc shown in the video, one of the text columns rotates upside-down and massively increases in size. If I change which item I drag to change reading order, sometimes it will just put one column directly on top of the other. I have not found a way to make it leave the text where it is. 

Acrobat doesn’t seem to recognize the text as one block when I use the “edit” tool to try to move the text back manually - it tends to only pick up one letter at a time. Any help would be appreciated 🙏

Note: I have this issue with many PDFs made in Canva. Before anyone asks, no, I can’t ask anyone to stop using Canva.

I’ve seen some fixes that involve exporting from Canva to PowerPoint, editing reading order in PowerPoint, and THEN exporting to Acrobat… but that’s a lot, no one should have to do all that using industry standard software. 

    Correct answer Amal Jaiswal

    ​Hi @makaylah_6533 

    Hope you're doing well and thanks for reaching out. We are sorry for the trouble you are experiencing.

    Before I walk you through the best fix, a couple of quick questions to help me point you in the right direction:

    1. When you exported the PDF from Canva, was the "Flatten PDF" checkbox unchecked? A flattened PDF merges everything into a single image layer and can cause exactly the kind of rotation and sizing chaos you are seeing.

    2. Which version of Acrobat Pro are you on? You can check under Help > About Adobe Acrobat. This will help confirm whether the newer cloud-based auto-tagging is available to you.

    3. Is the document a two-column layout throughout, or does the problematic column only appear on certain pages?

    Why this happens

    Canva PDFs exported directly can have severe accessibility issues, including missing tags and poor reading order. Canva's tagging may not be robust enough for downstream remediation in tools like Acrobat. The root cause of the rotation and size explosion is that the Reading Order tool is also controlling the architectural (stacking) order of elements. When an item is moved up or down in the Order panel, it can change the stacking order of the PDF layers, similar to Send to Front / Send to Back, which causes some items to become hidden or visually displaced behind other elements.

    The fix is to stop using the Reading Order panel's drag-to-reorder approach for this document and use the Tags panel instead.

    Step-by-step: fix reading order via the Tags panel (without moving visual elements)

    First, save a copy of your file before you start. Undo/redo is not supported for all Reading Order operations, so saving first is essential.

    1. Go to Hamburger menu > View > Show/Hide > Side panels > Accessibility Tags.

    2. Expand the full tag tree and click through each tag one by one. The corresponding content will highlight in the document so you can see exactly what is tagged where.

    3. Once you identify the two text columns, reorder them by dragging their tags up or down directly inside the Tags tree, not in the Order panel. By changing the order of a highlighted region in the Order panel, you effectively change the reading order of that item without changing the actual appearance of the PDF. However, for this scenario, working in the Tags tree directly avoids the stacking order conflict. Please check the helpx https://adobe.ly/4h7ctQG for more information.

    4. Verify the result by going back to the Reading Order dialog, selecting Show Order Panel, and confirming the numbered sequence is correct.

    For the full official walkthrough of the Tags panel, the Adobe Help article on Editing document structure with the Content and Tags panels is the best reference.

    If the tag structure is too broken to fix: start fresh on the page

    If the columns are hopelessly interleaved in the tag tree, the cleanest option is to clear and re-tag that page using the auto tag feature as described here https://adobe.ly/4h2Tgjb 

     

    Hope this will help.

    ~Amal

    2 replies

    ethonbrooks0707
    ethonbrooks0707
    Participating Frequently
    July 31, 2026

    That sounds like an unusual issue. Before changing the reading order, I'd check whether the PDF was created from a scanned document or exported from another application, since incorrect page rotation or OCR can sometimes affect how Acrobat interprets the content. It might also help to test the same file on another computer or with the latest Acrobat update to see whether the behavior is file-specific or environment-specific.

    Amal Jaiswal
    Community Manager
    Amal JaiswalCommunity ManagerCorrect answer
    Community Manager
    July 30, 2026

    ​Hi @makaylah_6533 

    Hope you're doing well and thanks for reaching out. We are sorry for the trouble you are experiencing.

    Before I walk you through the best fix, a couple of quick questions to help me point you in the right direction:

    1. When you exported the PDF from Canva, was the "Flatten PDF" checkbox unchecked? A flattened PDF merges everything into a single image layer and can cause exactly the kind of rotation and sizing chaos you are seeing.

    2. Which version of Acrobat Pro are you on? You can check under Help > About Adobe Acrobat. This will help confirm whether the newer cloud-based auto-tagging is available to you.

    3. Is the document a two-column layout throughout, or does the problematic column only appear on certain pages?

    Why this happens

    Canva PDFs exported directly can have severe accessibility issues, including missing tags and poor reading order. Canva's tagging may not be robust enough for downstream remediation in tools like Acrobat. The root cause of the rotation and size explosion is that the Reading Order tool is also controlling the architectural (stacking) order of elements. When an item is moved up or down in the Order panel, it can change the stacking order of the PDF layers, similar to Send to Front / Send to Back, which causes some items to become hidden or visually displaced behind other elements.

    The fix is to stop using the Reading Order panel's drag-to-reorder approach for this document and use the Tags panel instead.

    Step-by-step: fix reading order via the Tags panel (without moving visual elements)

    First, save a copy of your file before you start. Undo/redo is not supported for all Reading Order operations, so saving first is essential.

    1. Go to Hamburger menu > View > Show/Hide > Side panels > Accessibility Tags.

    2. Expand the full tag tree and click through each tag one by one. The corresponding content will highlight in the document so you can see exactly what is tagged where.

    3. Once you identify the two text columns, reorder them by dragging their tags up or down directly inside the Tags tree, not in the Order panel. By changing the order of a highlighted region in the Order panel, you effectively change the reading order of that item without changing the actual appearance of the PDF. However, for this scenario, working in the Tags tree directly avoids the stacking order conflict. Please check the helpx https://adobe.ly/4h7ctQG for more information.

    4. Verify the result by going back to the Reading Order dialog, selecting Show Order Panel, and confirming the numbered sequence is correct.

    For the full official walkthrough of the Tags panel, the Adobe Help article on Editing document structure with the Content and Tags panels is the best reference.

    If the tag structure is too broken to fix: start fresh on the page

    If the columns are hopelessly interleaved in the tag tree, the cleanest option is to clear and re-tag that page using the auto tag feature as described here https://adobe.ly/4h2Tgjb 

     

    Hope this will help.

    ~Amal

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