How do I adjust a PDF's internal hyperlinks/interactive annotations so it can reflow in Acrobat?

[Andrew Welker]

I'm working on a big digital book with lots of internal hyperlinks for convenient navigation (in addition to bookmarks), and a bunch of tagging so it's friendly to text-to-speech softwares and assistive technologies. I'd like to have just one file with all these features at once: internal hyperlinks and navigation buttons, accessible tags, and reflowable (specifically in Acrobat and not just other programs). But when I try to reflow my prototype PDF in Acrobat, it says I can't because "interactive annotations" (the hyperlinks and buttons, notated as interactive annotations in Acrobat's Content panel) can't be reflowed. So I'm looking for a workaround.

Here's my ideas right now for how I might be able to do this. Any thoughts?

• Give up.
• Find a way to make it that when you try to reflow the PDF in Acrobat, the interactive annotations are effectively "disabled" or "shut off," so they don't do anything while in reflow mode and thus don't mess with the reflow system.
• Find a way to keep the links and buttons still working in normal display mode, but without the "interactive annotation" status, so Acrobat doesn't care if they're there or not while reflowing. This may mean that the links still work (or try to work) while the document is reflowed, and I don't know how that would work if the user follows a link to a text anchor (as opposed to a specific page) or a button to go to whatever page they last visited.
• Maybe there's something to do with the Reference and Link tags that can provide functional internal hyperlinks and buttons, but without making them "interactive annotations"?

If you even have minimal insight on how to make this work, I'd appreciate it. I really like that Acrobat has a reflow view option and would really like to introduce it to readers who would appreciate it, but don't yet know it (or things like it) exist.

[Nolen_Alian9409]

You'll need to ensure the hyperlinks and annotations are set to adjust dynamically with reflow. In Acrobat, using the "Edit PDF" tool can help reposition links, but for full reflow support, structuring the document properly with tags in "Accessibility" settings is key. Similar to optimizing interactive elements in web design, a well-structured PDF improves usability across different views.

[Spam removed]

[Andrew Welker]

Fantastic, thank you! It sounds like there's a way to do keep the functional links AND annotation status AND be reflow compliant AND have proper tags! Right now I think I can do funtional links + annotation status + proper tags, OR I can do reflow compliance + proper tags, but not all 4 at once. I'm just unsure where to go in InDesign (where I'm preparing this, pre-export) or Acrobat to fix this, like you say should be possible. What is it in specific you think I could do to set the hyperlinks, buttons, and annotations to adjust dynamically with reflow? Like, what buttons do I press or what tags to I assign them?

Note: the links I'm currently working with are stationed in parent pages. In case that matters.

Here's the options I see from the Prepare for Accessibility tool.

When I'm in the Content panel, I see them on each page under Annotations.

In the Order panel, I only see them if I've overridden the parent page elements for that particular page.

In the Tags panel, I also only see them if I've overridden the parent page elements for that particular page.

[Andrew Welker]

UPDATE: Okay I'm not sure yet WHY it works, only that it is. But I did some fiddling and I've gotten a FUNCTIONAL link actually working in an exported PDF that reflows!!! Nolen, even if you can't see or respond to this before I figure it all out, thank you SO much for giving me a little more hope that this might be doable. It appears to have sent me in a really promising direction. 🙂

Here's what I did:

1. I saved a copy of the actual prototype file and did all of this on that copy.
2. I removed the parent page links.
3. I experimented with Type > Hyperlinks & Cross-References > Insert Cross Reference.
4. In the "New Cross-Reference" menu that opened up, I clicked the place I wanted to set a hyperlink destination: the title of the Table of Contents.
5.  Clicking the little Pencil icon in the menu's "Cross-Reference Format" section, I opened another menu and invented a non-default format referred the reader to "chapter [chapNum for the destination text anchor]".
6. I used that custom reference format.
7. I exported the PDF to see if it worked.

Next steps for experiments:

• Does it work because the text anchor hyperlink comes from the New Cross-Reference menu, instead of the Hyperlinks panel?
• Does it still work if I tag it as an Artifact?
• Does it still work if I put it as a de facto footer on the Parent Pages, without overrides?
• Does it still work if it's on the Parent Pages, but I override those elements on all pages?

[Andrew Welker]

Okay here's some of what I've discovered about how tags, links, and other such things in InDesign translate into an exported PDF. (Note: I'm aware that no one is necessarily going to read or respond to these extensive notes anytime soon, but hopefully in 3-15 years when some random internet user tries to find answers to these questions like I've been looking for, they find this and it saves them time. Hello, posterity!)

• Both the Cross-Reference method and Hyperlink Panel method work just fine.
• Artifacts can be clicked and found in normal view in Acrobat, but not in Reflow view in Acrobat.
• If you tag all of the text within a text frame as Artifact, then that text is an artifact in the PDF. If you tag only part of the text, none of it (not even the tagged portion) is an artifact in the PDF. I haven't tested whether this will apply to the threaded text boxes that make up part of a longer, continuous story.
• Anything on a Parent page that isn't Overridden will be an Artifact, even if it's tagged as something else.
• Assigning "custom" InDesign tags to content OTHER than "Artifact", "P", or "H1" to "H6" (didn't test a simple H), doesn't do anything special. Those get rephrased as either Sect,  Span, P, and maybe a few other things. These can be reconfigured in the Tags panel by right clicking any tag and pressing "Edit Role Map", opening the "Document Roles" drop down, selecting the InDesign Custom Tag or InDesign Paragraph/Character Style (used as a tag role sometimes, I guess?) you want to replace with an official PDF Tag (often by the same name), and clicking "Change Item". Then type in the name of the official PDF tag you'd want to replace it with. For example, I might switch "Body" style to "P" tag, or "BibEntry" custom InDesign tag to "BibEntry" official PDF tag. Note that once I did this, things started getting REAL weird when trying to reflow, and I think that may have been due to me putting non-container Tags on things that were supposed to work as containers (or vice versa), and then trying to reflow it all made Acrobat short circuit.

Here's some things I think I'd like to do with my project now, knowing this:

• I can choose between having a "Go Back to Last Page" or "...Last View" button visible in normal view on many pages (like a parent page element acting as a running footer), or I can have it be reflowable in Acrobat. I can't have both.
• I can tag text, text frames, objects, and the like with things other than P and Hn, but I need to be careful about what I tag how in this way. It's easy to suddenly, accidentally screw it all up.
• I think I'd rather have lots of hyperlink and text anchor based navigation links in this file AND have it be reflowable, than have those links AND it have that kind of back button BUT not be reflowable.

Here's some questions I still have that I'll investigate next (or maybe eventually or not at all, if it proves unnecessary):

• How can I use the NonStruct tag, the Private tag, the Span tag (or P, Reference, Link, or BibEntry) with an empty/null Actual Text attribute, or some other method to make it so text-to-speech screen readers will skip over running footer links AS IF they were artifacts, but they're still visible and usable when reflowed in Acrobat. This way sighted readers who want reflow but don't use TTS can still access these footer links reliably.
• InDesign has a variable for a "running header" - can I put a hyperlink to the Table of Contents or Index in that? Would that work better, worse, or about the same as the Cross Reference or Hyperlink Panel methods in general? What about for specific use-case scenarios?
• How can I use paragraph and character styles in InDesign to to map custom styles to certain content, that I then quickly and easily configure in Acrobat into the proper PDF styles I want them to be? I know there's buttons for that scattered across several different parts of InDesign, but they're just that - scattered. It appears that InDesign has not yet been built with "Let's make it moderately easy to create highly accessible, well tagged PDFs with this software, at least with some training" in mind.
• How does this all fall apart once I include tables, TOCs, indecies, and lists into my file? What table, TOC, list, and index specific tags can easily migrate from InDesign to exported PDF without fine tuning afterward in Acrobat? If not much, what can I do in InDesign that makes the fine tuning process go a lot faster and smoother?
• How does this work when exporting a PDF as several InDesign documents compiled in one Book save file? Does that change any of this? Is there anything I'd need to redo across all of the files?
• How do I ensure in InDesign that non-artifact content at the bottom of a page in normal view remains at the bottom in Reflow view? Like if I have a "Contents" link as a de facto footer and it's not an Artifact, how do I make sure that once I put the PDF into Reflow the "Contents" footer remains at the bottom of the reflowed view instead of jumping up to the top of the page? Is this a Structure thing, a layers thing, or maybe inherent under-the-hood hierarchy involving tags and multi-frame threaded stories?