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Re: Artifact tag vs. Change tag to artifact in Acrobat

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Mar 6, 2020 12:00PM

Hi Cindy,

> Hi - I am looking through some pdf documents that have been tagged by others, and I see that they are using the <Artifact> tag on items they want to artifact.

As Paul says there is an <Artifact> element defined in PDF 2.0 (published in 2017). Also as he says, there's little support for it today (so far). But if someone is making PDF 2.0 files and tagging PDFs this way I'd love to know it. If it's possible to share one of these files that would be great.

> I've always either right-clicked on the content box and chosen "Change tag to artifact" then deleted the tag, or I've used the Reading Order to mark a tag as background/artifact.

Yes, this is entirely appropriate for content that is irrelevant to the meaning of the document. The <Artifact> tag, however (as defined in PDF 2.0) does something a little different, which is why I'm keen to see your document.

> Does tagging something as an artifact have the same effect? I just don't see that used as often, and wondered if there is a reason.

In PDF 2.0 use of an <Artifact> tag with a PDF 2.0 viewer and supportive AT would allow a piece of content to be optional.

The classic use case is of line-numbers in a document. Sometimes you want to just read the document without hearing line-numbers; sometimes you need to reference a specific line. The <Artifact> structure type in PDF 2.0 provides AT developers with a way to offer this choice to AT users.

Duff.