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Re: Custom bullets in InDesign and Actual Text

for

From: Christine Hogenkamp
Date: Nov 15, 2022 10:06AM

@Colleen: Thank you for explaining and for flagging in the first place! I
did a test PDF to see what you meant and it did convert any numbered lists
to say "bullet" instead of the number.

Anyone feel free to correct my understanding, but I did some poking around
and it seems what the Preflight fix does is that it takes any list and adds
the default bullet symbol to the Actual Text box for each <Lbl> tag (this
is where bullets or numbers are supposed to go within the parent list tag)
so if I removed this bullet symbol from the Actual Text box then the list
number was read by NVDA as it should.

Part of the problem seems to be that in PDF tags, there is only the one
list tag. As a developer, I am used to having two types of list tags, one
for numbered lists <ol> and one for unnumbered lists <ul> but PDF tags only
has <L> and its inner tags for label, body, etc. So it's strange that the
Preflight fix would explicitly mention unordered tags when the reality is
that in PDF tag terms, all tags are unordered tags so it makes sense that
the fix adds the bullet symbol to every list regardless of whether it uses
a symbol or number to start each list item.

In my googling around, I have not come across a PDF standards approved way
to indicate that a list is a numbered list. So it would seem that Colleen's
manual fix option is the only way to remediate a PDF with numbered lists
when you use the Preflight fix. And whether you decide to use the Preflight
fix will depend on whether your PDF uses only unordered lists, or has a
mixture of unordered and ordered and how many of each.

It's just so strange that Adobe would create this fix but not consider what
would happen to ordered lists, they must be aware of the singular <L> and
that Acrobat would have no way to tell the difference between the two types
of lists unless they create such an option in either InDesign or Acrobat.
Puzzling!

*x*
*Christine Hogenkamp (She, Her)*
Front-end Developer
ContextCreative.com <http://contextcreative.com/>;

*We've moved! **Our new address is:*
*172 King St. E., Suite 300, Toronto, ON M5A 1J3*


On Mon, Nov 14, 2022 at 5:07 PM Colleen Gratzer < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> Sure, Christine.
>
> What I meant is that it will add actual text to the numbers of a list
> and voice them as "bullet" instead of the original number.
>
> Colleen
>