From: Nikolai Grigoriev (grig@renderx.com)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 07:41:14 PST
Ryan,
> I am having problems making PDFs generated from XEP (3.6)
> accessible. I get the following error when trying to add tags
> to the document in Acrobat 6:
> "Bad PDF; could not read page structure. <Bad PDF; error
> in processing fonts: cannot find CMap resource file>[1]"
I believe the problem stays within Acrobat Make Accessible plug-in.
The documentation for Acrobat 5.0 says:
> - Font Encodings: The MakeAccessible Plug-In maps fonts
> used in the document to a Unicode value. In some cases,
> a font encoding used within a PDF document does not
> contain enough information for the MakeAccessible
> Plug-In to map to a Unicode equivalent.
It looks like nothing changed in Acrobat 6.0.
Apparently, MakeAccessible is confused by /Identity-H
CMap that we use to specify encoding for TrueType fonts.
I wonder why it does so: there is an explicit /ToUnicode
CMap at each font descriptor. (You can test yourself
that TrueType text in our PDF files can be searched
and copied to the clipboard; this proves that the Unicode
mapping information is already there).
If I am right in my conclusions, the issue appears to be
a real serious limitation of the plug-in. Have you spoken
to Adobe about it?
Right now, I see no alternative to using /Identity-H
for TrueType fonts. The only suggestion that comes
to mind: switch to Type1 fonts. They don't use CMaps:
perhaps things will be easier there.
> More generally, can anyone comment on XEP's support
> (or lack thereof) for creating accessible PDFs?
XEP 3.6 does not support tagged PDF out of the box.
We have plans in this direction, but it will inevitably
be a long run: tagging PDF is a tough task. (Adobe
invented lots of tricky structures in the PDF, but
didn't care even to define a standard character collection
for plain Unicode. Sometimes, I have an impression
that they deliberately complicate things for developers :-))
Regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX
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