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Re: Converting word docx documents to PDF

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From: John E Brandt
Date: Oct 28, 2011 2:42PM

What are you using to do the PDF conversion?

If you have a Word document that is formatted correctly (e.g., alternative descriptions for your images, semantically correct headings, and tables that have "heading" info, etc.) if you simply use the "Save As" function in Word to save you document as a PDF, it will *probably* convert just fine and show up having no accessibility errors in accessibility checker built into Adobe Acrobat Pro. To do this you choose Save As, and in the "Save as type:" drop-down menu, simply choose "PDF" from the choices provided.

I have had less success (recently no success) with the "Save as Adobe PDF" utility that gets installed by Adobe Connect Pro. While this gives you some extra controls and settings, but I have found the conversions often do not go smoothly. I think part of the reason may have been that I had Office 2007 installed and then upgraded to Office 2010.

If you have old Word documents (pre Word 2007), you need to convert them into the new Word version (i.e., .docx) for you to be able to successfully convert them to accessible PDF. But my experience has been that this doesn't always happen smoothly.

I have also found that documents created by "many hands," files that may have been converted from an iWork Pages document or had stuff cut and pasted into them, with cause problems when trying to convert to PDF. You may have to strip our ALL of the formatting, and re-format.

If you have the opportunity to upgrade to Office 2010, there is an accessibility checker tool installed into that version which helps the process considerably.

I have never had any success with any of the free "word-to-pdf" applications as they typically just convert the file to an image.

Hope this helps.

~j

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA