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Re: PDF Readability for people with Moderate Low Vision

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Dec 1, 2009 6:40PM

> My question is this: Suppose I'm reading
> well structured tagged PDF. How can I
> change the Font style, the letter, word
> and line spacing, and font sizing at the
> document element level (tag level). The
> modifications are really necessary for
> moderate low vision.

Wayne, what do you mean by "font sizing at the document element level (tag level)"?

What you can do, it use ctrl+plus to zoom in on the document, and if you hit ctrl+4 you will enable reflow so that you won't need to scroll horizontally to view the zoomed text. The reflow assumes that you have a tagged PDF document, although the zooming does not.

For the font style and spacing, you can't currently change that in PDF documents.

If you are using Acrobat, an workaround might be to do a "Save as" or
"Export" to html. If it's a well-structured PDF, this might yield a
similarly structured html file. You could then either zoom the font
size in your browser, or apply your own style sheet for more detailed
control over type display.

In acrobat you can save as Word, RTF, HTML, or text, and users with Reader can save to text. With just text you will lose any beneficial visual formatting for headings as well as the semantics like list, headings, and table structures that should be present in a well-tagged PDF file, so there are some trade offs.

AWK