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Re: Accessible GIS coordinates

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Oct 31, 2013 2:08PM

We are producing PDFs as the final format (although sometimes Word.docx are
the finals).

Your workaround in Acrobat is a solution and we thought about doing that a
few weeks ago, but it's not practical in a professional publishing
environment because it doesn't solve the problem in the source document
(such as Word or InDesign). We and our clients are producing hundreds of
pages a day . . . a day.

In this particular tour book, there are close to 1,000 glyphs that we would
need to hand-fix in Acrobat with the span tag with Actual Text.

Since there is no way to automate this in Acrobat (not that I know of!), we
would have to search for each glyph, select it, make a new span tag from it,
and add the Actual Text to the span tag.

And then repeat this 1,000 times.

If it took 1/2 minute per glyph, that's more than 8 hours of labor, nonstop,
no breaks.

This is not feasible! Even if I provided massive amounts of stimulants to my
staff (caffeine, sugar, chocolate, whatever) they'd mutiny within an hour!

Plus, as many of us have discussed on this list, it's always better to
correct the source document from which we export out a hopefully perfect
PDF. Well, that's the goal.

In a normal publishing production workflow, we go through many iterations of
a document. There are always changes and more changes to a so-called "final
PDF" by clients, editors, authors, directors of the organization etc. We
always have to go back to the source document, make substantial changes, and
re-export to PDF at least 2-3 times before it's finally finished. And these
are "final" PDFs we're making, not preliminary versions.

That's the normal workflow for publishers. Think of it as a whirlwind or
tornado of unending chaos.

So I need to be able to create a totally accessible source document in Word
and InDesign so that I can export out a totally accessible PDF from them,
and do that each time the client makes changes to the source which forces a
new PDF to be exported.

I need the tools in Word and InDesign. By the time we're in Acrobat, it's
too late in the workflow to fix items like this unless it's just one or two
in the document.

-Bevi
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