Exporting the language property of styles to tagged PDF, possible?

[Manan Joshi]

Hi All,

I wanted to know if the language property set in Paragraph/Character Style with InDesign can be exported to PDF. I am not able to get this exported to PDF. See the screenshots for reference.

-Manan

[Eugene Tyson]

Hi

I think I saw this question pop up by another user recently and I couldn't figure it out. 

The only place it shows up is here

Done by 

Seems whichever language I select here the 2 letter Country Code is added

et for Estonia

for GB it's EN-GB 

Presumee it could be EN-US if selected. 

Lanaguage appears to be a property for InDesign dictionary only - and can't be tagged per paragraph/characters for PDF taggings.

Appears to be a PDF addition of a Tag. 

When I look through the option in the PDF - Estonia is not even an option

Seems to be a limited set of languages.

I can type Estonia and it sticks

But it's not an option for individual paragraphs

I can add it to the entire article

Or select each individual paragraph in the tags and type in whatever I want

[Manan Joshi]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts @Eugene Tyson. Let me tag other folks as well who could help in this @Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com @Laubender 

[Peter Kahrel]

@Frans v.d. Geest Frans, do you have any ideas?

[Frans v.d. Geest]

Yes: set the main language in the Export PDF, Advanced, using the character style on parts that are different in a paragraph and usually a Paragraph style for complete paragraphs in another than the main language. It is indeed correct that you see this in the tag properties under the Content tag not the Tag tab, and it is an abbreviation (et).

[Joel Cherney]

Do we know exactly which ISO 639 abbreviation to use, here?

In the Acrobat documentation, when setting the document language, I see that if the language isn't present one should type in the "ISO 639" abbreviation. Problem is that there are a few variants, here - Eugene's OP shows the two-letter ISO 639-1 standard, and also the 2-2 macrolanguage + locale which IIRC isn't actually part of the ISO 639 standard (it is "industry standard" to create language codes from ISO 639-1 langcode + ISO 3166-1 country code, but it feels weird to talk about nonstandard things being "standard" when I'm keying in the standards-body acronym repeatedly).  I'm guessing that is what is going to work in the Document Language dropdown, but so far as I know there's no way to specify these languages in the paragraph or character styles, so if one was to want to make accessible PDFs in a target language supported by Acrobat but not present in InDesign's dropdowns, it'd have to be handled by content-level post-PDF-export remediation, not within InDesign's styles.

I'm also guessing that the answer to my question isn't documented anywhere, is it? 

[Eugene Tyson]

Yeh I don't think you can do it from InDesign - I think the accessibility for the languages needs to be added to the PDF after it's created from InDesign. 

It's an interesting feature request. 

Maybe it could be scripted to detect the language used in the paragraph/character styles and then apply that to the PDF when it's created. 

But way beyond anything I can even fathom, don't even know if it's really possible.

[Frans v.d. Geest]

Haven not tested it myself, so no idea if it would show as ootion in InDesign nor if it would tag correctly, but maybe give it a try:

https://github.com/gooselinux/hunspell-et