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Losing tags after editing document in acrobat dc

New Here ,
Aug 21, 2020 Aug 21, 2020

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Hi,

found out that editing a pdf in Acrobat DC breaks up accessibility and attached tags are lost. 

Makes me very unhappy. Is there a workaround? When will this bug be fixed?

 

(Going back to InDesign, do the changes creates a lot of redoing tagging added form fields.

Lengthy and tedious work... So I prefer to do minor changes in Acrobat DC)

 

Thanks,

Leendert

 

InDesign 15.1.1

Acrobat DC 2020.012.20041

 

TOPICS
PDF forms , Standards and accessibility

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Adobe Employee ,
Aug 21, 2020 Aug 21, 2020

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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

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New Here ,
Aug 25, 2020 Aug 25, 2020

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Hi Amal,

 

thank you for your quick reply and sorry it took some time for me to get back to you.

The issue is not file specific, I see it in multiple files.

I did check for updates, the version you mentioned is what I use. Need to do a check to see if the issue is solved.

 

Meanwhile, I'll go through the link you sent me and will get back to you with results.

 

Related question: if I insert a corrected pdf page and add tags to all form fields (from that page) will this influence the tags already in the document (the other pages)?

 

Thanks, have a great day,

Leendert

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New Here ,
Aug 28, 2020 Aug 28, 2020

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Hi Amal,

 

I did a test with the latest version (20.12.20043) and it worked 🙂 Tags are intact.

See attached screenshot. Column 1 is the original (as it came in from InDesign), column 2 was the one I worked on in version 20.12.20041 and column 3 is the one I did with the latest version. Only (visible) difference between column 1 and 3 is column 3 has one paragraph, while column 1 has many. I can't oversee consequences of thattags.png.

 

 

 

 

Leaves me with my related question: if I insert a corrected pdf page and add tags to all form fields (from that page) will this influence the tags already in the document (the other pages)?

 

Thanks for the heads up!

Leendert

 

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New Here ,
Aug 31, 2020 Aug 31, 2020

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Hi Amal,

 

did some further testing and changing in live files. Some paragraphs go well, some don't 😞 Besides losing the tags (the paragraph becomes an artifact) it looses its hyphenation as well.

Makes me sad. Let me know if you need more info.

 

Regards,

Leendert

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Community Expert ,
Aug 31, 2020 Aug 31, 2020

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There is a new discussion going on here about tagging in Acrobat: https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat/fixing-decorative-items-creates-lt-artifact-gt-tag/m-p/113997...

 

You may want to swing by and check some of the links that I posted.

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New Here ,
Aug 31, 2020 Aug 31, 2020

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Thanks for the link. The discussion is about fixing decorative items being incorrectly tagged.

My problem has to do with minor text changes in Acrobat and once done the tag is gone. With the latest update some text is handled correctly and some don't. Yack.

I've read the links, no solution.

 

Have to redo all the tagging of all form fields if I want to do minor text changes; create new pdf page and insert it. After that Find element, specify tag, say yes. Next put them in the right place in the tag tree. Tedious. Frustrated!

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Community Expert ,
Aug 31, 2020 Aug 31, 2020

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Have you run a full report with the accessibility checker tool to see what discrepancies are found?

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Community Expert ,
Aug 31, 2020 Aug 31, 2020

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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.

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer & Technologist for Accessible Documents
|    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

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New Here ,
Aug 31, 2020 Aug 31, 2020

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Thank you Bevi!

 

I will take a look at your schedule for the classes. Super.

 

For now old school redo job.

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Community Beginner ,
Sep 05, 2020 Sep 05, 2020

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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

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