The InDesigner

Thanks, Huw. It’s good to be back. Look for more from me in the weeks and months to come, both here on the site and elsewhere. Besides these Adobe TV videos, there’s an article of mine in the upcoming issue (#42) of InDesign Magazine, showcasing some of my design work and how I used Data Merge to accomplish it. I’m also doing an all-day event in Washington D.C. in September and I’ll be working again with Lynda.com soon. Hopefully, the podcast will resurface in there somewhere, too, but those boys and my toddler are keeping me a little too busy to commit to that just yet. 🙂

Have you organized your content in the Articles panel the way it needs to flow in the PDF? Also, be sure that you’re not confusing the Tab Order in Acrobat with “breaking up” your stories. The true test of how the document content is structured is to be sure that you’ve turned on the Use Document Structure option in Acrobat that I demo in the second video, and that you look in the tags panel to see if a whole article is properly contained within one “parent” Article tag. Technically, Acrobat “breaks” every line of text into a separate tagged item, but that’s all invisible, behind the scenes stuff. You should be seeing a direct match between your InDesign Articles panel hierarchy and Acrobat’s Tags hierarchy.

The Order panel is not necessarily going to give you an accurate representation of how your page is tagged. The two are separate parts of the PDF structure, and it’s the Tags that are what needs to be right for accessibility. If you look in the Tags panel, you should see a structure that matches how you set everything up in the InDesign Articles panel. I tested it out on my end and I do see an Order panel that’s not what I’d like, but my Tags panel is dead-on (see below).

Mat —

If you want to copy text from one document to another but not have the styles brought into the destination document, use the Paste Without Formatting option (Shift-Cmd-V on the Mac / Shift-Ctrl-V on Windows). That will paste in the text without the styles, but also without any of it’s previous formatting. Instead, the pasted text will take on the attributes of whatever style is applied at the insertion point where you pasted it.

If you want to have the incoming text’s formatting “switch” to use styles in the destination document, you’d first need to make the style names in both documents match exactly (their attributes don’t have to be anything alike…just their names). When you do that, Pasting it in the destination document will reformat the text to the destination document’s definition of that style.

I hope this answers your question.

Michael

I’m having the same experience as econ. Having carefully added items in order to the Articles palete in InDesign, the reading order in Acrobat X is totally scrambled. Michael is quite right to point out that if you look at the Tags, the items are in the right order (and if you listen to Read Aloud they are read in the right order).

But then what’s the point of the Acrobat Reading Order? I know a lot of people who look at this to see if a file is correctly prepared for screen readers. Are they just wrong to do this?

It would be a lot of work to order all my items a second time over, so they look right in Acrobat’s Reading Order.

I’m assuming by “chart” that you mean an InDesign Table of rows and columns. If that’s the case, it depends on whether or not that table is “inline” (part of a larger text frame containing the full flow of text in your main story), or it a separate frame by itself. If it’s inline, it will appear in the proper order within the main body text if that main body text frame is in the Articles panel. If it’s a separate frame, you’ll have to add it to the Articles panel separately. Acrobat will recognize an InDesign table and tag it accordingly.