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Re: PDF-Tagging: Heading level changes during export from DOCXto PDF

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From: Chagnon | PubCom.com
Date: Oct 6, 2015 5:38AM

Not that problem, but I've seen others when exporting PDFs from MS Word 2013.

Check that you're using the Acrobat Ribbon Bar/Plug-in (set the Acrobat Preferences first) and not File/Print nor File/Save as Adobe PDF.

--Bevi Chagnon

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From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of <EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: Tuesday, October 6, 2015 5:51 AM
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Subject: [WebAIM] PDF-Tagging: Heading level changes during export from DOCX to PDF

Hi list,

recently I keep on encountering some really bizarre behavior of Word 2013/Acrobat Pro. In an MS Word document, there are correctly marked-up headings. They use a style which is assigned, for instance, heading level 3. Everything indicates that Word recognizes this heading correctly: it's part of the table of contents on level 3, it is displayed on the third level of navigation view tree, and the style window also shows the correct heading level.

Once I export the document to PDF, however, the heading level is messed up. I've had H5 become H1, and everything from H2 to H4 was tagged as H3 to H5 instead. In my current document, H3 becomes H4 and H4 becomes H3. There is no role mapping done which overrides the standard settings, and I tried multiple export methods without solving the issue. As said above, as far as I can see all settings in Word are correct.

The only way I managed to solve this problem so far was re-creating the styles in question from scratch, which is what I'll do if I have no alternative, but not my preferred solution. (Since the document is quite long and complex, I try to avoid tampering with its styles as little as possible, lest mistakes sneak in unnoticed.)

This only happened to me in large and complex documents, and in a year and a half of frequently checking Word documents and PDFs I've never seen anything like it before. Did anyone else ever encounter this bug? If so, did you find any other way of repairing the headings?

Thanks,
Nasrin