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Re: PDF Tagging - layout tables.

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jul 13, 2022 5:21AM

There's nothing like role="presentation" in PDFs. As Ryan says, you're going to have to re-tag the content, one tag at a time.

What I have wanted for years is a way to record and replay sequences of actions to make this sort of thing much faster. We were able to do that 15 years ago with Acrobat 7 because the Tags and Content panels were keyboard accessible. We bought a keystroke recorder that emulated a keyboard, and the efficiency improvement was staggering.

For instance, it took just a few seconds to create a list with all the <LI>, <Lbl> and <LBody> tags, or a table with all the <TH> tags, including "scope" attributes. You then had to drag all the content into the appropriate tags, but that was trivially easy.

Sadly, the Tags panel hasn't been keyboard accessible since Acrobat 8 (which is unforgivable), so the keystroke recorder technique no longer works. In principle, some other method of automation should be possible, but it would need to be able to programmatically interact with the Tags panel and would be much more complex if it's even possible at all.

Does anyone know if there is a way to record and replay sequences of actions such as changing the selected tag type or adding attributes to it? I had hoped that Acrobat's Action Wizard would do that, but it looks like it performs actions on entire documents, not individual tags.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd