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What Tagged PDF Means

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Creating a *.pdf can become overwhelming with all the options if you don’t know what they mean. Luckily, most of them are by design fairly obvious.

One, however, came off as quite interesting to me.

Do you want to create a tagged PDF?

Looking up on Google what a tagged PDF was, I found out that tags provide information about how the document goes together, things like header, footer, watermarks, table of contents, lists, and figures are defined in a tag.

In essence this means that a tagged document contains [more] meta-information around certain groups of PDF instructions inside a page content.

Why do I want to create a tagged PDF?

Creating a tagged PDF allows it to be reflowed when viewed in different kind of screens. So, for example, if we want to view our pdf on a mobile device, it can adjust the lines and pages to fit the new screen size… kind of.

So, if it may be understandable:

Characteristics of a properly tagged PDF:

  • The PDF file includes a logical reading order for its content
  • Images are given correct alternate descriptions
  • Tables are correctly tagged to represent the table structure
  • Form-fields are authored to promote their utility to screen-readers
  • Represents text as Unicode to clear up composition irregularities such as soft and hard hyphens

Thanks a lot to Planet PDF for help with this information!

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