Losing tags after editing document in acrobat dc

Struggling with this now - is there still no work around in 2025? 

Hello, I also encountered that problem, it’s annoying. Sometimes only the column which you edit is effected, sometimes the whole page. The upside is that the second time you edit the tags on a page, it hopefully goes faster...

If you have the source file, edit it in the appropriate program (Indesign, Word, whatever) and export only the page you changed, you can of course insert it in the existing file, or combine the one-page new file with the existing one. The first user in this thread (leendertv73417970) asked whether this would effect the tags in the rest of the document. In my experience, it does not, so this can be a good workaround. But links from or to the changed page may nog work anymore after this action, so be cautious.

Best regards,

Bram

This has been a known bug in accessible, tagged PDF for a long time, probably 10 years or more.

After a PDF has been tagged, you can't make any editorial changes to the content...don't swap out a comma for a period, don't cross a "t," change a number, NO CHANGES TO THE CONTENT.

If you do, you'll get the strange corruption of the tags and reading order. Paragraphs now are missing tags and artifacted, paragraphs of text are merged, the complex nested tag structures in tables and lists are messed up. Footnotes, hyperlinks, just about everything else is wrecked.

And more surprises! Wherever in the document you make the editorial change, the tag problem can show up elsewhere in the document. Make the edit on page 1 and the tags might still be ok on that page, but check page 100 and the tags are crazy.

What you can't see is that editing the content breaks the structure of the content itself, not just the tags, so often it's impossible to fix the untagged paragraphs with any accessibility tools.

This is a serious problem.

Visit Acrobat.UserVoice.com and voice your opinion loudly to Adobe. This is an egrecious bug...especially for those of us who create complex accessible PDFs. This forum is a user-to-user help forum, so any complaints here will never reach the Acrobat engineering team, nor Adobe's marketing department which essentially controls engineering. Adobe has known about the bug for a long, long time.

RE: Workarounds:

There are none. If it wasn't a form, you could slip in a good version of the tagged page into an existing tagged PDF (Thumbnails pane, insert Page from File).

But because you're creating forms, that most likely won't be possible...and keep all of the reading orders in tact (we have a blog about the 4 reading orders for accessibility in PDFs [Blog: The 4 Reading Orders in Accessible PDFs]  Something won't be correct somewhere.

With forms, and all accessible PDFs, we recommend that you go back to the source document, make the edits, and re-export a revised PDF.

Somewhere in your post you mentioned that you're correcting the <Form> tags and doing a lot of manual work in Acrobat. We teach a method in our 508 InDesign Forms class on how to export a nearly complete, accessible PDF AcroForm from InDesign. And with a 3rd party plug-in, you can add calculations and scripts to form fields in InDesign. (Unfortunately, our 508 InDesign Forms class was last week (August 2020) but we run it periodically throughout the year so check our class calendar at www.PubCom.com/classes).

So it IS possible to go back to the source InDesign, make the edits, and re-export the PDF.

But yes, totally agree with you. We should be able to make edits in the PDF itself without the tags going total ape-poop because a "t" was crossed.

Hi Leendert

We are sorry for the trouble. As described the tags are lost after editing the document.

Is this a behavior with this particular PDF file or with all the PDFs that you edit? Please try with a different PDF file and check for the issue. If its a file specific issue please share the file with us for testing.

Also, we have released a new optional update for Adobe Acrobat/Reader DC version 20.12.20043. Please update the application to the new version from the help menu > check for updates and see if that makes any difference.

For more information about examining and repairing the tag structure please take a look at the help article https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/pdf-repair-add-tags.html

Keep us posted with the results

Regards

Amal