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Re: Help with a PDF with Numbered lines

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jul 19, 2011 8:33AM

19.07.2011 17:01, Kathryn Becker wrote:

> I have a PDF where every line is numbered (like a legal document). I¹m
> trying to decide how to best tag it.

Do you mean tagging it in PDF format (which I know very little about) or
as converted to another format, such as HTML or Word? This affects the
features that might be used.

> If I make each line a paragraph, the
> number is read with that content, but it isn¹t really set off. If I mark
> each of those line numbers as a lower level heading, then they would be set
> off, but they are still read in the midst of sentences, and I would think
> that would be distracting, too. If I artifact the numbers, that does no one
> any good when something is referred to as ³in line 425 we mention².

If line numbers are relevant information, as they apparently are here,
the text can most logically be described as a table, with one column
containing the numbers and the other the lines. Depending on the browser
and assistive software, this might give the user possibilities that
don't exist with other markup. I mean things like jumping to a line by
its line number (which would me marked up as a table header cell, i.e.
th element). A table format is also useful if the user wishes to simply
copy the data into Excel or comparable program. After all, there are
people who like to use Excel for everything!

In HTML format, this may imply efficiency issues, on graphic browsers,
as normally a browser needs to read an entire table before it can start
rendering it (as even the last line may affect the column widths). If
the issue is important, it can normally be fixed using CSS.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/