Mapping styles from inDesign to Acrobat Pro

Report · Mar 03, 2022

Good morning. Does anyone know if they are going to add the rest of the Acrobat Pro reserved words; such as BlockQuote, Note, and Caption to the Export Tagging options of a style? I am constantly searching and retagging some of my styles in Acrobat because it defaults to a P tag. Even if I go into the Roles in Acrobat and assign for example /caption to /caption, I still end up doing a lot of cleaning up of my tags. I work with a lot of images and other graphic types that have captions. When I change the Roles to the correct reserved word, they are still in p tags and I have to search, move and delete empty tags to get my tag structure correct. This is what it looks like before and after changing roles.

image container

figure caption

After changing roles in Acrobat:

image container

text container

I have to move the Figure out of the Caption tag. Then move the Caption tag into the Figure tag. Add the text container from the P tag to the Caption tag. Delete the empty P tag. It should look like the following

figure container

text container

When I have a 300 page manuscript with over 150 images this takes a long time to fix.

Any suggestions? Will Adobe be adding the other reserve words from Acrobat to the Export Tagging options in inDesign?

Thanks for all your help.

Frances Smith

USDA, Forest Service

Report · Mar 03, 2022

@Frances5C25 wrote:

Will Adobe be adding the other reserve words from Acrobat to the Export Tagging options in inDesign?

We don't know what Adobe will be adding until they announce it. You can make a feature request here:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests

I'll tag accessibilty experts @Chad Chelius , @Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com , and @maxwithdax .

Jane

Report · Mar 03, 2022

Jane is right, we have no idea what or when Adobe will be adding a feature. That being said, what you can do is create a style called Caption and apply it to all of your captions in the document. Then, when you create the PDF, go into the Role Map of the PDF and delete the entry for Caption > P. Now all of your captions will actually have the Caption tag applied. Hopefully this will save you some time. Also, InDesign can do this for you automatically but only if you use the Live Caption feature in InDesign which is problematic if you have captions that flow to a second line. Finally, MadeToTag allows you to map Caption and BlockQuote to a style.

Report · Mar 03, 2022

Chad, I always create a style in inDesign called Caption. When I went to role mapping in Acrobat and changed the /caption /p to /caption /caption, my example above showing the tag structure for AFTER editing roles in Acrobat occurs. All my figure tags are now in caption tags and caption tags inside of p tags. What a mess. I spend more time editing pdfs then I should just because of role mapping and tags.

Report · Mar 04, 2022

Please re-read my post above. Bevi just summarized what I stated in my one paragraph post above. I didn't say to change the Role map entry, I wanted you to delete it altogether.

Report · Mar 03, 2022

Seems there is a price tag associated with MadeToTag? My agency won't pay for this. Correct me if I am wrong.

Report · Mar 03, 2022

Hi @Frances5C25,

Additional tags in InDesign:

No idea if Adobe will ever add the additional tags from the PDF/UA-1 specification.

But you can vote for this feature request at https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/39806554-ad...

And if we did, we couldn't tell you because we're all under NDAs.

Tag structure for <Caption>:

At this time, it is not recommended that <Caption> be a child tag nested inside the <Figure> tag. This is per the PDF Association, which develops and manages all PDF specifications and creates the PDF standards for the ISO (International Standards Organization).

So make things easier and skip that complex tag structure because it doesn't work with A.T.

The PDF Association created a free user guide to the Tagged PDF/UA Syntax Guide available at: https://www.pdfa.org/resource/tagged-pdf-best-practice-guide-syntax/ You'll find explanations of how to apply the tags to various document situations, as well as examples.

In Section 4.1.3, it recommends this tag structure where the tags are equal siblings, not parent/child nesting:

At this time, assistive technologies cannot drill down into the <Figure> tag and voice or retrieve the <Caption> information when it's inside <Figure>, so we strongly urge that you change your workflow on this.

Correct Figure/Caption structure. At this time, don't nest <Caption> inside <Figure>.

Role Mapping in Acrobat:

If you edit the <Caption> role map to <Caption>, you now have circuitous role mapping: it's illegal in any programming language to map an element to itself and many accessibility checkers will flag it.

Our Hack for <Caption> tags:

Here's an easier way and it's legal.

Name your InDesign style to match the tag, Caption. (As you've done.)
Set its Export Tag to Automatic.
In Acrobat, use Edit Role Map to delete the role mapping that InDesign put in. (Don't edit it: "Caption / Caption" is circuitous mapping and an error flagged by most checkers.)

No role mapping needed if the original custom tag is correct.

Theory: when your PDF is exported from InDesign, the conversion utility takes your style names and uses them to create "custom" tags in the PDF's code. <Caption> is one of them. Role mapping is needed only when the "custom" tag isn't in the PDF/UA-1 tag set, like <Body_Text> being role mapped to .

But your <Caption> tag IS in the PDF tag set, so it doesn't need any role mapping at all. It's fine as is.

Hint: use this hack for the other block-level tags (aka, paragraph styles) that are missing, like <Note>, <BlockQuote>, etc.

Bigger question for Adobe:

Why do they a) role map a compliant style name at all, just leave it alone please, and b) not give us the ability to select the entire tag set in our style definitions (your first question).

Report · Mar 03, 2022

Thanks Bevi.

Theory: when your PDF is exported from InDesign, the conversion utility takes your style names and uses them to create "custom" tags in the PDF's code. <Caption> is one of them. Role mapping is needed only when the "custom" tag isn't in the PDF/UA-1 tag set, like <Body_Text> being role mapped to .
But your <Caption> tag IS in the PDF tag set, so it doesn't need any role mapping at all. It's fine as is.

Then why does the tag still say instead of <CAption>? I need it to say caption so I know that component is fixed.

Frances

Report · Mar 03, 2022

When you delete the entry in Role Mapping:

/ Caption / P

It then should show as <Caption> in the tag tree.

Once the role mapping is removed, the Tag Tree shows the original tag, which if you named your InDesign style "Caption" should be <Caption> in the PDF.

Also, in your caption's paragraph style, make sure it's set to Automatic, not P.