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From: Alan Zaitchik
Date: Fri, Feb 16 2018 9:30AM
Subject: Data Row spanning page boundary in Word to PDF conversion
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I have some Word documents from a client, with very long lists in certain table cells. This causes those table rows to span a page boundary in Word, no matter that I set the table row properties to disallow it. It also causes the table to look bad. Headings are repeated on every page as appropriate.

Since I am saving the Word doc as PDF and remediating it as a PDF for return to the client, does this matter? I mean, the user can choose to read the PDF not page-by-page anyway, correct? Thanks,
Alan

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Fri, Feb 16 2018 12:00PM
Subject: Re: Data Row spanning page boundary in Word to PDF conversion
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This should not be an issue for a screen reader user if the PDF is
tagged correctly, but you will have to do some remediation of the PDF
after you generate it. For other users, while it may be awkward and
undesirable, and create usability issues, I don't think it is
technically an accessibility violation, provided that the PDF is
properly tagged.

Page breaks are physical page elements and are not part of the tag tree.
A table in a PDF can span as many pages as you want and still retain an
understandable and accessible tag structure. A single TD (table data
cell) tag can span a page break.

You will probably have to mark repeated header rows after the first one
as artifacts because most versions of Word insert them as real rows.

You will also need to fix the table rows that span across a page break
because neither Word  nor the Acrobat PDF maker seem to be able to
figure out how to tag those as a single continuous TR. This may involve
moving content from one or more TDs into matching TDs in the previous
row or otherwise merging two TRs into one. And if the main content of
each cell (or TD tag) is a single long List (or L tag), then you'll
similarly have to clean up whatever the PDF converter has done to split
the list into two so that all the associated List Items (LI tags) are
properly located under a single L tag.

Other options to consider: split the content into two logical rows,
change the page orientation, change the column widths. But if none of
these options work in your case, then I don't have a good solution to
make a really long table cell better.

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications

On 2018-02-16 11:30 AM, Alan Zaitchik wrote:
> I have some Word documents from a client, with very long lists in certain table cells. This causes those table rows to span a page boundary in Word, no matter that I set the table row properties to disallow it. It also causes the table to look bad. Headings are repeated on every page as appropriate.
>
> Since I am saving the Word doc as PDF and remediating it as a PDF for return to the client, does this matter? I mean, the user can choose to read the PDF not page-by-page anyway, correct? Thanks,
> Alan
>
> > > >