Exporting to accessible PDF, paragraphs splitting into individual lines

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
October 22, 2019
3 replies
3710 views

Why are my paragraph tags splitting into individual lines (all in their own tag) when I export out of Indesign CC to an accessible PDF? I've tried both with and without using the articles panel. It makes for a much more complicated document structure in Acrobat when you need to make some changes. Have checked all of the proper buttons such as "Use for reading order" in the articles panel, and editing the export tags, etc.

marct14230458

Participating Frequently

I've had the same problem and I managed to fix it in InDesign - I found this page here to start, but then this page and the linked page, really didn't help at all. hope it help you and others.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/accessible-pdfs-every-line-in-paragraph-being-tagged-individually/m-p/15255991#M619857

T

time18

Inspiring

You could consider removing the Accessability set in the PDF and start again using Acrobat to create an Accessible file.

It might structure it better, or how you would expect. If the document is heavy on layout style (magazine with multiple columns and pitures) this might not be the best suggestion. As with any tests, always duplicate your file first to avoid 'mucking up' your one and only file.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

Is this what you're seeing?

The little yellow bankers boxes are content containers, not tags. You'll see them line-by-line from InDesign layouts. They do not affect accessibility because assistive technologies only recognize the tags in the tag tree.

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

MTUM02Author

Participant

Yes, the copy is, line-for-line, in individual bankers boxes as you show, but in most cases each bankers box is within a separate [span] tag. (Sorry, don't have the greater than/less than symbol on my Mac keyboard). Sometimes they are coming through grouped under one [P] tag, but often in separate tags. Also, sometimes they are in P tags and sometimes in Span tags, which are grouped under a P tag.

Bevi Chagnon @ PubCom

Participating Frequently

You can ignore the <Span> tags, they merely indicate that something was manually formatted in the source document. An example: italics, bold, underlining. They'll also appear around software hyphens at the end of a line. And earlier versions of InDesign put them around everything in error.

At this time in industry, the <Span> tag is usually ignore by AT, although that will change in the future.

However, they can indicate poor construction of an INDD for accessibility. Generally you do not want to manually format anything in your layout: use only paragraph and character styles and avoid the top Control Panel (or its new sibling, the Properties Panel) to format your text. Manual formatting severely affects accessibility with some assistive technologies.

If you do find separate <P> tags in text that you think should be just one, then check your layout to see if you have a hard return inside a paragraph (thereby splitting one paragraph into two). When the PDF export utility is run, it will always look for hard returns and tag the content as a separate <P> tag.

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