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Acrobat for Windows and Mac: Editing PDFs

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BUG: Edit PDF (text editing) Breaks Tag Structure

Windows environment.

When using the Edit PDF Tool to change minor character styles (color, weight, underscore, etc.), the Tag structure and read order for the page the edit is applied are broken.

For example: change the color of a header (H1) line of text. Return to the Tags Panel and all current page content has been consolidated into one <p> Tag. All the original Tags associated with this page are empty and placed randomly through the Tag Structure. Depending on page content, you may be unable to break apart the new tag single into the individual Tags necessary for compliance, especially email, URL, or footnote links as such links may or may not retain elements for compliance once recreated.

To recreate, build a simple Word Document with header, paragraphs, and add a hyperlink or two to a paragraph. Export to PDF, remediate as necessary. Edit any text on page (color, face, etc.). Review Tag Panel for results.

Ideally, we would make such edits in source file; however, tools are available in Acrobat PRO. I would expect that one tool would not negatively affect another within the same app.

Additionally, Edit Tool affects text placement. Changing the color of a center-aligned text frame font may force random attribution changes such left alignment or line breaking of that text. This also affects Tag structure explained above.

Respectfully,

  • Noel
23 votes

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  • Terri Walker commented  ·   ·  Report

    How many votes qualifies for a change/fix? This one is particularly insane.

  • Tom M commented  ·   ·  Report

    Really? It is March 2024 and this is not fixed...

  • Julie J commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is the most annoying bug. Spent hours doing form for the blind and one small change have to retag the whole document.

  • Bevi Chagnon | PubCom.com commented  ·   ·  Report

    It's July 2023 and nothing has been fixed with this bug.

    But the latest Acrobat version 2023.003 gives us a brand new user interface that everyone hates and never ever asked for.

  • David Rumsey commented  ·   ·  Report

    We use Acrobat Pro as part of our professional remediation service that we offer our clients. This bug should be fixed ASAP since it prevents making minor edits to a PDF that has already been remediated.

    When a client comes back with a minor update request a week/month/year later for a previously remediated document, we have to charge them to remediate the entire page instead of making a 10 second update to the document.

    To make a simple text change it requires changing the source doc (InDesign, Word, etc.), re-exporting the PDF, deleting the page from the original document, importing the updated page from the new version, and then re-remediating the entire page.

    And if there are other pages that link to or reference this page, then those pages typically have to be redone also. This means changing a simple character on the page can incur a lot of unnecessary costs for the clients (and unwanted frustrations on our business). Please fix this.

  • Angel commented  ·   ·  Report

    Has this been resolved?

  • Lynna Landstreet commented  ·   ·  Report

    This bug is absolutely maddening. I'm trying to remediate a document with a ton of footnotes, and every time I tag a footnote it messes with the formatting, and then when I try to fix the formatting it messes up the tag structure. It seems impossible to get it right, and it makes PDF remediation for accessibility incredibly difficult in some cases, if not impossible. Please, please fix it!

  • Liz commented  ·   ·  Report

    I have been working on figuring out how to remediate a document for two days! Just added links to internal pages after inserting them using "organizing pages" from other files. Checked tags and accessibility after every step. THEN, when I added the internal links, and colored them blue with underline using Edit PDF, it completely blew up the tags!!! Great...after all of my work, it is ruined. PLEASE FIX THIS!

  • Regal Georg commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is still an Issue! Please fix it as soon as possible! Especially it makes it almost impossible to fix errors (e.g. wrong added links) done by the auto-tag tag function (eg. wrong links) because if I delete the wrong link it breaks the tag and auto-tag adds the link again. stuck in an infinity loop here.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    So either we have tagged documents or we have editable documents.

    Hey, I've got an idea, let's have BOTH!!!

    I vote for this as well!!!

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    This bug should be fixed immediately - it should not require a vote. It renders the affected tags "inaccessible" to screen reader users. This is unacceptable.

  • mally commented  ·   ·  Report

    So irritating. Fix this,please.

  • Mary Helen Shuff commented  ·   ·  Report

    Also occurs in the Mac environment as well.

    Yes, I voted for this fix!

  • JR commented  ·   ·  Report

    I'm logged in but I cannot vote, the "Vote" button does nothing!

  • Bevi Chagnon | PubCom.com commented  ·   ·  Report

    The broken tag tree happens whenever ANY editorial change is made the actual content, even swapping a period for a comma.

    And the broken tags can happen anywhere in the document, not just on the page where the editorial change was made.

    This is a serious bug; please fix it!
    There is not workaround.