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Re: More problems with tables, PDF, and screen readers

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From: chagnon@pubcom.com
Date: Apr 3, 2018 8:25PM

Glen Walker wrote:
<Quote> We've run into the Acrobat setting for large documents before but it sounded like this was a separate issue. I made a simple table in Word that spanned several pages. When I saved as PDF, the resulting tagged PDF had a <table> tag on every page with its own <thead> and <tbody>, so there was literally one table per page. That sounds like a bug in Word. </Quote>

It was a bug in the Word-to-PDF conversion, but has been corrected with the latest versions of Word and the Acrobat plug-in for Office, PDF Maker. Sounds like one or both of your software programs is at least a year out-of-date.

Solution: Update both software programs. Current versions are:
Word 2016 version 1803 or Word 365
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC version 2018.011.2038
Adobe PDF Maker version 18 (the plug-in is installed with Acrobat)

There's a slight chance some operator error slipped into your file too, so make sure the following is done in the Word file:

1. Select the header row and ensure that the Header Row check box is selected in the Table/Design ribbon.

2. With header row selected, also go to Table Properties / Row / and check Repeat as header row at the top of each page.

With the right software and the right settings in Word, you'll get a perfect table. Well, other than right now we get only 1 row automatically tagged as the header, but understand that Microsoft is aware of that shortcoming and we should be able to set multiple rows as repeating headers in the future.

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