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Re: Complex Tables on PDFs

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From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Oct 17, 2013 1:43PM

Hi Rabab,

tagged PDF does support IDs and headers to express complex table cell relationships.

In Acrobat Pro it is possible in principle (but not in an elegant or efficient fashion) to create IDs for table cells and to referenced them in header entries in other cells. I do not know pif anybody who has actually used this in production (it is just too cumbersome).

For InDesign CS 5.5 and newer axaio (the company I work for) has created a plug-in called MadeToTag (for fully functional demos see www.axaio.com), which makes it relatively easy to prepare complex tables for export to tagged PDF, such that MadeToTag post-processes the InDesign exported PDF and injects the necessary IDs and headers into the table structures.

If I am not mistaken the axesPDF plug-in (developed by xyMedia, www.xymedia.ch) for Microsoft Word offers a similar feature for PDFs created in Microsoft Word.


To the best of my knowledge, for complex tables that do have non-trivial column and/or row headers, IDs and headers would be the only way to tag them properly.


Olaf


Am 17 Oct 2013 um 21:32 schrieb Rabab Gomaa < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> I didn't see in the PDF WCAG techniques any example on coding ID/headers in a PDF.
> Does this mean that ID/headers are not required for complex tables in PDF? using TR,TH,TD structure is enough?