stopping Acrobat from combining text blocks in reading order

[Z***@adobeforums.com]

I'm using the TouchUp Reading Order tool in Acrobat 8 Professional to create an "accessible" PDF. There are certain blocks of text that it keeps wanting to combine into one, but that creates an incorrect reading order. How can I stop Acrobat from automatically combining adjacent boxes into one?

[P***@adobeforums.com]

Touch up reading order shows you as few "blocks" on the page as possible to make it easier to see if the order is correct by inspection. If you have a column of text that show as one block and, say, the bottom half of the column needs to not follow the top half it can be tricky to select the bottom half and change it's order.

Here is one way to do it:
Suppose the text column is

aaaaa
bbbbb
ccccc
ddddd
eeeee

and the last two lines need to be a separate block that gets put somewhere else in the reading order.

1. Select the ccccc line and mark it as Background text.
2. This will split the run so ddddd and eeeee will be a separate block. Move it to the correct place in the reading order.
3. select ccccc again and mark it is Text. This will recombine it with the column flow.

[Z***@adobeforums.com]

Hi Philip,

Your technique works for some of my pages where the reading order was incorrect. But there are a few cases that I still can't fix this way. I wish I could post a PDF to show you exactly what I mean, but I'll try to describe it as well as I can.

In have a page with the following on it, from top to bottom:

paragraph of text
3 columns of text
paragraph of text

The 3 columns of text are a list of three steps. On the left it says, from top to bottom: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3. Next to each step is a paragraph. To the right of each paragraph is another paragraph that provides additional information about the paragraph to its left.

I want these columns to be read across, not down, so that "Step 1" and then its two paragraphs are reader, then "Step 2" and its two paragraphs, then "Step 3" and its two paragraphs.

But Acrobat will only group the text into columns, not rows, or it will group the entire 3 columns and 3 rows into one big block, in which case it will still be read down instead of across.

I suppose I could try to use a table as a hack for this, but I hate using the wrong markup to get the reading order correctly. Not sure what other implications this has.

Any other ideas?

[P***@adobeforums.com]

If I understand this correctly, you have a page that looks like this:

11111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111

22222222 3333333333 444444444444
22222222 3333333333 444444444444

55555555555555555555555555555555
55555555555555555555555555555555

and you want the order to be as indicated by the numbers. If that is correct, I see the problem. You are running into a limitation of touch-up-reading-order's ability to display the order. If things are in the right order, it displays as one big block because all of the elements ARE in the correct top-to-bottom and left to right order.

In order to see whether they are in the correct order and to see the effect of trying to change the order, you can use the Tags panel which is a more advanced (and harder to use and understand) interface. Here is what to do:

1. open the tags panel (view >nav panels > Tags)
2. In the tags panel, there is a popup menu labelled Options or with a gear icon. Click that and select Highlight Content.
3. Switch to the text select tool and select some of the text in the "11111" paragraph. In the tag panel, click the gear/option menu and select Find Tag From Selection. This should show you where in the document's structure that first paragraph is.
4. Now, you can click in the tags panel on following paragraphs and a box will be drawn around the content.

If your columns are in the correct order, you should be able to see the rectangle around them as you click on successive paragraphs in the Tags panel. You can use the Tags panel at the same time as touch-up-reading order to see the effect of selecting a region and clicking Text (or another tag).

After you get the hang of it, it isn't too much harder than the basic reading order panel.

[Z***@adobeforums.com]

No, the page looks like this:

11111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111

22222222 3333333333 444444444444
55555555 6666666666 777777777777
88888888 9999999999 10 10 10 10

11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11
11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11

Each of these blocks are in separate tags already, as indicated by the Tags panel, but if you turn on the reading out loud thing, it still reads them down columns instead of across rows. This is also the case when I Save As accessible text -- it does not reflect the order of the tags in the Tags panel, but rather the order from the Order panel, which is incorrect.

[P***@adobeforums.com]

Do you possibly have one of the settings to override the order set in Edit > Preferences > Reading or Advanced > Accessibility > Change Reading Options? In particular, the "Override the reading order in tagged documents" affects the behavior a lot.

I took your example and dragged a selection around each numbered item 2 through 10 and clicked Text in the reading order tool. Read out loud then read them in the desired numeric order for me.

If you change settings, be sure to close and reopen the document as the setting won't take effect until the next open.

[Z***@adobeforums.com]

Hi Philip,

I don't have "Override the reading order in tagged documents" checked. The "Change Reading Options" option is grayed out for me under Advanced > Accessibility.

I don't know what else to say. There's nothing else I can try. I'm just going to have to resort to a table to get it to read across and then down.

Thanks for your help,
Zoe