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RE: PDF for accessability

for

From: julian.rickards
Date: Mar 25, 2004 1:12PM

I haven't tested with the latest version of WordPerfect, my sons' new Dell
computer came with WordPerfect 11, 12 may be out soon or even now - I can
play with it tonight and if there is any improvements over my copy of
WordPerfect 10, I can add it to this list.

However, in October 2002, I went to a Adobe workshop on creating Accessible
PDFs. The Adobe representatives told us that because Corel sees Adobe as a
direct competitor (CorelDRAW/Photo Paint vs. Adobe Illustrator/PhotoShop),
Corel wasn't receptive to Adobe's offers to work with them to help
WordPerfect users create Accessible PDFs directly from the application.
WordPerfect has a "Save as PDF" option which precludes the need for
WordPerfect users to purchase Acrobat if all they need is PDF creation but
it doesn't create Accessible PDFs.

WordPerfect is not the only application in this same boat, there are others
including Lotus WordPro and MS Word 97 and earlier. The issue is not the
ability to create a PDF but to preserve the structure of the document. PDF
1.4 is the first version of the PDF standard which allows tagging. The
tagging in PDF 1.4 (and PDF 1.5 when it is available if not already) marks
up headings as headings, table cells as table cells, etc. not unlike HTML.
Although virtually all word processing software have these structures
internally within the application and the documents, currently, only MS Word
2000 and up can send this document structure information to Acrobat via the
PDFMaker macro (other Adobe products such as InDesign, PageMaker and
Framemaker can do this too). However, if you use MS Word 2000 (or up) and
print to Distiller instead of using the PDFMaker macro, no PDF tags are
created: the styles are preserved but the document structure is lost.

It is possible to take a PDF (PDF 1.4 version) from WordPerfect and in
Acrobat 5 or 6, tag it with the document structure but that can be a long
and labourious (and torturous) process, even more so for long documents.
Each block must be selected and tagged with the appropriate document
structure.

The simplest method is to save the WordPerfect document in Word .doc format
and then open the Word document, check the document structure and then make
the PDF from Word 2000 and up.

---------------------------------------------------------
Julian Rickards
Digital Publications Distribution Coordinator
Publications Services Section
Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines
Phone: (705) 670-5608
Fax: (705) 670-5690


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