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Guy_I
Known Participant
August 31, 2020
Question

Word 365 to Acrobat: PDFMaker generates wrong tags

  • August 31, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 3719 views

I used the Save As Adobe PDF button in Word 365 to convert a file to Acrobat. When I open the PDF in Acrobat DC Pro, the tags are incorrect.

 

The first item in the TOC is tagged <TOCI> in the Tags Pane, but the rest have heading tags (e.g., H1, H2, H3). In the Page View, the tags say <Reference>. (The items with heading tags are not inside the <TOC> tag.) 

 

Random paragraphs are tagged as <TOCI> in the Tags pane when they should be <P>; a few headings also show the <TOCI>. However, in the Page View, they show as <P> (or the correct heading tag). 

 

Some figure captions are tagged <H2> in the Tags Pane when they normally come across as <P>. In the Page View, they show <P>. 

 

Figures come across tagged as <P> in both the Tags Pane and the Page View. When I try to change them to <Figure> (either by selecting and clicking Figure in the TURO, or by changing directly in the Tags Pane), Acrobat DC won't change them. 

 

What's going on, and how do I correct it? 

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2 replies

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
August 31, 2020

<QUOTE> "I used the Save As Adobe PDF button in Word 365 to convert a file to Acrobat. When I open the PDF in Acrobat DC Pro, the tags are incorrect."

 

I'm assuming you're on a Windows computer, and that this command was under the File menu.

 

Can you try making a PDF using the Acrobat Ribbon?

First, check the Preferences in the ribbon and make sure your accessibility settings are correct.

 

Then, Create PDF.

 

|&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Bevi Chagnon &nbsp;&nbsp;|&nbsp;&nbsp;Designer, Trainer, &amp; Technologist for Accessible Documents ||&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;PubCom |&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Classes &amp; Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs &amp; MS Office |
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
August 31, 2020

@inkedguy, after checking your export settings, drill down into your Word file and ensure these were done correctly. Given the hodgepodge of errors you're having, I'm suspecting it might be due to how your Word document was formatted.

 

One key rule: paragraph formatting styles must be applied to all of your text. The styles trigger the correct tags in the exported PDF.

 

Check these items in Word:

 

  1. Word's TOC utility was used to create the TOC, and was not made by hand.  References ribbon/tab | Table of Contents icon. For now, choose one of the defaults: Automatic Table 1 or Automatic Table 2.
  2. Check which paragraph formatting styles were applied to your headings (and other text, if you have time).
    Open the Styles Pane, and from it, Open the Styles Inspector. As you click inside each heading or paragraph of text, verify that the style Heading 1 was applied to the heading you want to be tagged <H1> in the PDF. Similar for the remaining headings, Heading 2 style = <H2>, Heading 3 style = <H3>, you get the pattern!
  3. You might need to clear out any residual formatting on those paragraphs in order to get the tags to come out correctly. If that's the case, select the paragraph of text, and click the Clear All formatting button from either the Styles Pane or the Styles Inspector. Then reapply the correct paragraph style to the paragraph.

 

Notes: In order to generate a TOC with the correct tags <TOC> | <TOCI> plus the accessible links tags, you must:

  • Use the correct heading paragraph styles to format your document's headings,
  • Use Word's TOC utility to generate the TOC, and
  • Don't manually edit the TOC after it is created. It's a generated part of the file and you don't want to mess with it.

 

In order to generate the correct heading tags in a PDF <H1>, <H2>, etc., you must use the corresponding Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. paragraph formatting styles to format the heading paragraphs. There are no exceptions.

 

|&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Bevi Chagnon &nbsp;&nbsp;|&nbsp;&nbsp;Designer, Trainer, &amp; Technologist for Accessible Documents ||&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;PubCom |&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Classes &amp; Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs &amp; MS Office |
Karl Heinz Kremer
Community Expert
Karl Heinz KremerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 31, 2020

When you save as PDF, are you using the function built into Word, or are you using Acrobat's PDFMaker (the Acrobat ribbon in Word)? If it's Word, then unfortunately, this is not the right place to get answers, you will have to talk to Microsoft. If it's Acrobat, then we need to dig further to see what's going on. 

G
Guy_IAuthor
Known Participant
August 31, 2020

Fair question. I tried it both ways, with the same result. 

 

Guy

 

Karl Heinz Kremer
Community Expert
Karl Heinz KremerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 31, 2020

That's interesting, and points to a problem in Word, and not in the PDF generation. The two different PDF generators you've tried don't share any code, so if both come up with the same tag tree, then the problem is with the information that the Word document provides when the file is exported to PDF. Unless somebody here can help you with a Word problem, I would suggest that you ask this question in a forum that's about MS Word. I am not familiar enough with all details regarding tagging in Word - all I know is that the outline level gets used to determine what tags to use. My more in depth tagging experience is limited to Adobe InDesign. As far as general troubleshooting goes, I would check to see if this happens with all documents, or just with one or a small number. If not all documents are affected,  I would look into recreating at least part of the document from scratch, including recreating paragraph styles, to see if something in the document got messed up. 

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