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There are many converter available on the market to create and manipulate PDF file from a simple HTML/CSS page. These tools are very convenient to create quickly some nice PDF files without the hassle of the more complex reporting tools of this world.

I am using Winnovative software to achieve this goal but I was wondering how to create accessible file (tagged PDF) to improve text-to-speach tool processing.

Are there any HTML tags that exists to achieve this? Anybody has some experience with this kind of requirements?

JayMF
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3 Answers3

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The tool itself has to be able to support the pdf/ua spec (tagged pdf). The list of possible PDF tags corresponds nicely to html tags. For example, there are <h1> through <h6> tags, table tags (<table>, <th>, <tr>, <td>), list tags (<l>, <li>), and so on.

There are minor differences, such as the tag to start a list is <l> instead of html's <ul> or <ol>. With a PDF document, the screen reader will say "list with 3 items" and then you navigate through each item. It doesn't seem to care if it's bulleted or numbered, thus the reason pdf/ua has <l> and html has <ol> and <ul>.

Anyway, the point is you don't need to use any special html tags to generate tagged pdf. The tool that generates the pdf just needs to support pdf/ua. I didn't see anything on Winnovative's website that indicated it support it.

FYI, here are the tags available in PDF/UA

<Art>
<Annot>
<BibEntry>
<BlockQuote>
<Caption>
<Code>
<Div>
<Document>
<Figure>
<Form>
<Formula>
<H>
<H1>
<H2>
<H3>
<H4>
<H5>
<H6>
<Index>
<Lbl>
<Link>
<L>
<LI>
<Lbody>
<Note>
<P>
<Part>
<Quote>
<Reference>
<Sect>
<Span>
<Table>
<TD>
<TH>
<TOC>
<TOCI>
<TR>
slugolicious
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  • Do you have any other converter in mind that supports this PDF/UA? Preferably compatible with .NET or Java. Even the more expensive tools such as Aspose PDF do not support it yet, so I am a bit in the dark as to how to achieve this goal. – JayMF Jan 25 '16 at 14:19
  • @JayMF did you find any HTML to PDF/UA converted? – tepez Mar 05 '17 at 08:39
  • @tepez Sorry for late answer but nope. We are still using Winnovative without tagging. – JayMF Aug 05 '17 at 22:17
  • Thanks for the answer @JayMF! – tepez Aug 07 '17 at 17:29
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Essential PDF supports generating tagged PDF when converting from HTML to PDF using the Internet Explorer MSHTML engine.

Note: I work for Syncfusion.

Davis Jebaraj
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Good explanation in slugolicious' answer about tagging PDF. While researching accessible PDF output for a project I found PDFReactor (www.pdfreactor.com) can do this. Unfortunately there's no budget for a license in this project right now, so I haven't tested it in production, but have tried the free personal version with satisfying results.

Bram
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