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Re: PDF Conversion tools

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Feb 8, 2011 9:03PM

Neeraj,
Accessibility-wise you have the same problem going out from PDF to another format that you may have had going in to PDF. If your PDF files are not accessible enough then chances are they were not made correctly. If they are accessible, then Adobe Acrobat does a very nice job exporting to Word or HTML, with all of the necessary semantics - you'll have accessible Word and HTML files with potentially no effort _if_ the PDF files were created accessibly.

If not, you'll get the text of the document. Maybe. If the PDFs are scanned images that happen to be wrapped up as a PDF, you'll get nothing until you do OCR (Acrobat has this feature). That's the worst-case scenario, but the documents could have been created in a number of ways that would make the text incorrectly ordered or missing structure (e.g. using text boxes to create columns in word will result in an improperly ordered PDF, which will then result in an improperly ordered Word document from the PDF - neither the PDF nor the word documents in this case would be accessible).

I'm rambling a bit here, but the bottom line is that if your documents are not accessible now then you will have work to do to make them accessible. If you make them accessible in PDF then you get the HTML or Word easily with Acrobat. If you use Adobe Reader or some other tool to export the text you'll have similar work to do to add the structure/semantics/alternatives, plus you may need to work on the styling.

If you provide more information about your PDF documents we may be able to offer more specific advice.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

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