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Re: Quark to tagged pdf

for

From: Zwack, Melanie
Date: Jun 11, 2004 11:08AM

That is very interesting to hear about InDesign, because InDesign is one of
the programs that Acrobat lists as one of the 5 programs that will convert
very nicely to accessible PDF format. The 5 programs they list in their
documentation are: Microsoft Office 2000 (Word, Powerpoint, Excel),
Microsoft Office XP (Word, Powerpoint, Excel), InDesign CS, FrameMaker 7.0,
PageMaker 7.0. And, given the fact that InDesign is an Adobe Product and
Acrobat is also created by Adobe I'm real surprised to hear about your
experience with InDesign.

I've personally worked with MS Office 2000 & XP, and have had very nice
results converting those documents over to accessible PDF format. You can
really tell that they have worked specifically with Adobe to make this
conversion very nice. In fact, recently I have learned that I can add the
alt tags right in Word (PowerPoint, Excel), and they convert right over to
accessible PDF format.

***The methods I use for converting Quark to accessible PDF format (Quark
has not worked with Adobe Acrobat like the 5 programs above, so often the
conversion is not real smooth, and if its too bad it may not be worth the
trouble of converting to accessible PDF format, but rather do HTML or
ASCII):
- I never seem to hear of people converted Quark documents to accessible PDF
format, but we have been having some success with these documents here. Some
of it, I believe has to do with how the document has been developed. Right
now, we are trying to work with our desktop publishers to develop the
products differently, so the conversion process can be improved.
- If there is a problem with jumbled text on a page, the text for that page
can be placed in an alt tag of a or tag on that page. If
necessary, you can even add all the text from the page into the alt tag (or
several pages of text if necessary) to get the page to read correctly. Then,
you would delete out the problem tags, so the tag with the
alt tag containing all the text will read the text correctly.
- These methods are really only advisable for a Quark document conversion to
accessible PDF

BTW, Here's an Accessible PDF Learning Center on Planetpdf.com:
http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=3456