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Re: Making older PDFs accessible

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Feb 20, 2019 12:40PM

Hi Laurie,

Welcome to the WebAIM mailing list!

As Glen suggest, if a table is causing your table editor to crash, the
problem is usually related to incorrect row or column "span" settings on
one or more cells. PDF files that have been generated by (especially old
versions of) Microsoft Office sometimes have all kinds of extra cells or
rows or columns with incorrect span settings.

You can sometimes get a table back into an editable state by changing
all the span attributes (both row span and column span) on all TH's to
TD's for all cells in a table to 1. But this can be tricky to do in
Acrobat unless you can actually open the table in the table editor.

You can manually edit a span by editing the properties of the TH or TD
tag, but I don't have a good online explanation of how to do that:
- Right-click on a tag to pull up the Properties dialog (shortcut P), then
- Select Edit Tag (shortcut Alt-E), then
- Find the right Tag Element to change (!)

Also, Glen, I didn't know about these webinars, thanks for highlighting
them!

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications

On 2019-02-20 1:59 PM, glen walker wrote:
> Sounds like you might be having trouble with colspan or rowspan if it's
> skipping rows. Adobe is in the middle of a 6-part webinar series talking
> about PDF remediation. Last week they talked about tables so it might be
> worth watching:
>
> https://youtu.be/kcM_jyHGd6Y?t=339
> (the url skips the first 5-ish minutes but you can move the seek bar to the
> beginning if you want)
>
> Glen
> > > >