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Re: Can Word and Adobe ACrobat on a Mac make accessible/tagged PDF files?

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From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Mar 10, 2014 4:18AM

Hi Gunnar,

just to clarify a few things about Microsoft Word (and several other of Microsoft's office apps):

- on Windows, Word has been doing a kind of OK job of exporting to tagged PDF; this functionality is executed by Microsoft's own module "Save as PDF", and has been available since a service pack for Office 2007 was released

- before that Adobe Acrobat was the only way for many to create a tagged PDF from Word; Acrobat installed a helper tool in Word, and as far as I know did a lot of magic to inject custom codes into Word's PostScript generation, sent that through Distiller, which understood the custom codes, and produced a tagged PDF; it may also be that some clean up was done after the PDF had been created

- on Mac Microsoft decided to rely on the print output path that the operating system provides - which is fully PDF based but without any support for tagged PDF; what Microsoft did not do - which is very unfortunate - is to take their "Save as PDF" module and migrate it to Mac OS X; this would obviously have been a possible option, but for whatever reason Microsoft did not go for it

- as options to extend Microsoft office applications are much more limited on Mac than on Windows, I believe Adobe was unable to find a way to do the same magic stuff on Mac they did on Windows (especially before the Save as PDF module came out)

- the only good news here is: even if an author creates a Microsoft Word file on Mac, not at all is lost - just launch Microsoft Word on a Windows operating system, and save to PDF from there. Please understand that the feature set between Word for Windows and Word for Mac has never overlapped 100%; for example, there are are some accessibility related features on Windows that do not exist on Mac (but I do not have the details at hand).


In practical terms: if you have a Word file on Mac, move it to a Windows machine with Word on it, and export to tagged PDF from there. Trying to do it on Mac only will not lead anywhere as of today, as far as I can tell. Maybe Apple Pages becomes accessible one day? Who knows. Will Microsoft migrate their Save as PDF plug-in to Mac one day? Who knows.


Olaf


Am 10 Mar 2014 um 03:48 schrieb "Birkir R. Gunnarsson" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:
> It seems like Word for Mac does not export tagged PDF files when saved
> as PDF in the Word document, at least not by default.