Any reason NOT to generate tagged PDF?

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whunter
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 429
Joined: Thu Mar 12, 2009 4:49 pm
Location: Portland, OR

Any reason NOT to generate tagged PDF?

Post by whunter »

Corporate must have pushed out an Adobe Reader update, because suddenly when I try to open a PDF I get an annoying "preparing document for reading" message.
I produce some rather large PDFs, and I can imagine this process getting quite annoying.

I notice that if I enable "Generate Tagged PDF" in the target in Flare, I don't get the message anymore. Great! But, is there any reason I should NOT do this?
I poked around the Internet a tiny bit and did not find an immediate answer so I thought I'd ask this group. But I totally understand if the answer is complicated and I really need to research it.
LTinker68
Master Propellus Maximus
Posts: 7247
Joined: Thu Feb 16, 2006 9:38 pm

Re: Any reason NOT to generate tagged PDF?

Post by LTinker68 »

Total guess off the top of my head and with very limited Googling to see if I was right... I think tagged PDFs are supposed to help with screen readers for users with disabilities. Sort of the onscreen PDF version of a 508-compliant website. So whether or not you need to create tagged PDF depends on if you have disabled users. I have a small user group, none of whom need a screen reader, so I don't need to worry about it, but if I were producing something for public consumption, I would generate 508-compliance websites and tagged PDFs. Or you could generate two sets of PDFs -- one for screen readers and one for not.
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Lisa
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