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Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
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November 2, 2023
Question

PDF Maker: New Bug puts <Figure> tags in the wrong reading order

  • November 2, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 971 views

Call outs to Subrato (Adobe) @SubratoNamata and Franz @Frans v.d. Geest...

 

Affects Windows Office users who use Adobe Acrobat PDF Maker (the Acrobat ribbon) to export PDFs from MS Office apps. Definitely affects US English versions, and may affect other language versions.

 

With the recent Acrobat update on either Sept. 12 or Oct. 17, 2023 (Acrobat ver. 23.006.xxxxx with PDF Maker 23 and Library 23.6.136), figures anchored in the Word.docx file do not end up in the correct location in the PDF's tag tree.

 

<Figure> tags are scattered randomly throughout the PDF's Tag Tree, sometimes several pages AFTER their anchor point in the Word.docx. Some <Figure> tags do get placed correctly in the Tag Tree, but the majority don't. (See the 3rd photo in the attached test PDF.)

 

This is a very OLD bug that has just resurfaced to haunt us again. It was common in all PDFs exported from Word up until about 2015 or so. I don't have a clue why this  *&^%$#@!  bug is back in PDF Maker.

 

Solutions:

 

  1. Do not update Acrobat until Adobe releases a bug fix.  And turn off AutoUpdate in your account management.
     
  2. If your Acrobat was updated to version 23.006.xxxxx and now has the bug, then bypass Adobe PDF Maker entirely and use Microsoft's built-in PDF export utility to create accessible PDFs:  File / Save As / PDF and check the option to tag the PDF file. This method places the <Figure> tags in the correct location in the Tag Tree. We have a free tutorial about this method at https://www.pubcom.com/blog/tutorials/ms-office/export-pdf/index.shtml

 

Note: Sandbox test of Word 365 + Exported PDF are attached.

 

    2 replies

    R
    rosemaryevans
    Participant
    September 23, 2025

    I know this thread is old, but for anyone still having this issue. When we use the desktop Acrobat plug in to make pdfs we got figures that were out of order. If we used the save as feature, we got the right order, but our paragraph tags transferred as span containers (paragraph tags are there though). The solution we found that doesn't have any of these issues is to use the online "Convert Microsoft Word files to pdf" that is found as a tool in your online Acrobat portal. I have no explanation why that one works and the other two do not. But it is a relief to finally be back in 2023 when everything worked. 

    J
    Jonathan Whiting
    Participant
    November 9, 2023

    Bevi, thanks for your vigilance on Acrobat issues, and for providing test documents. 

     

    I have this new version of PDFMaker, so I decided to look at your documents, but I'm not catching the issue. The <Figure> tags in the PDF are in the places that I would have expected. The location of the <Figure> tag for the 3rd picture (glacier) was strange, but the tag location is aligns with the anchor location in the Word doc. 

     

    Could you help me understand the issue? 

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