Hello community,
I've encountered an issue which I am unable to fix easily. Whenever working with right-to-left languages in InDesign, the reading order is left-to-right in PDF. I have tried everything on the forum to no avail. The only thing that fixed reading order in Acrobat is autotagging, but then I have to correct all accessibility issues all over again.
This is a detail of everything I have tried:
INDD
- We are using the InDesign that is specific for Middle Eastern Languages
- Paragraph composer is set to "Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer"
- Paragraph direction is set to "Right to Left"
- Ligatures are "On"
- In the parts where there is a mix of English and Arabic, we have manually selected the English text and set the character direction to "Left to Right", then we manually selected all Arabic text and set the character direction to "Right to Left"
- We set the language to Arabic in the upper panel and also in "Advanced" when exporting the interactive PDF.
PDF
- In Menu > Preferences > Language, we set it to "Right to Left" and enabled "Ligatures". Still, when opening the file exported from INDD, the reading order is left to right. Moving tags individually could work, but would be very time-consuming.
- Something new that we tried is opening the PDF, setting the language to Arabic and all options to Right to Left and autotagging the document. This worked in the sense that now the reading order is correct, but this renders lots of accessibility issues.
Is there a way to correct this in InDesign? I have talked to many people who are experiencing this issue in RTL languages, and it is really disappointing Adobe is not offering a solution other than manually fixing.
Thank you so much for your input! #accessibility #acrobat #arabic #righttoleft #indesign #adacompliance
AdChoices