PDF20: Using Adobe Acrobat Pro's Table Editor to repair mistagged tables

This example is shown with Adobe Acrobat Pro. There are other software tools that perform similar functions. See the list of other software tools in PDF Authoring Tools that Provide Accessibility Support.

This example uses a table that was marked up correctly when it was created in Microsoft Word. Some table headers span two rows in the header row; one table header spans two columns.

To check the table in the PDF document:

1. Advanced > Accessibility > TouchUp Reading Order...

2. Select the table by clicking the number in the top left hand corner of the table (3 in the reading order in the image below).

3. Select the Table Editor button on the TouchUp Reading Order panel. The table cells will be outlined in red and labeled with their tags. The red outlines may not exactly match up to the table cells but you should be able to determine if the cells are tagged correctly.

The following image shows the example table in the TouchUp Reading Order tool. Note that the Results header appears to span two sub-headers and the other headers to the left span the two rows in the Results header.

The following images shows the example table in the Table Editor. The cells are outlined in red, and the tab for each cell is displayed. Upon conversion, the Results header was incorrectly split and does not span its two sub-headers. The headers to the right were incorrectly split into 2 cells each and do not span the Results headers. In addition, the incorrectly split cells were merged into one cell.

To repair the Results header:

1. Select the header in the table (it will be outlined in blue when selected)

2. Access the context menu

3. Select Table Cell Properties...

4. In the Table Cell Properties dialog, change the Column Span from 1 to 2

5. Press OK. You'll get a warning that the change might result in a malformed table structure. In this case, the change is correct. The cell you changed should change color to show the new span, as shown in the following image.

Similarly, to repair the incorrectly split header cells to the left of Results header:

1. Select the top cell in the column (it will be outlined in blue when selected)

2. Access the context menu

3. Select Table Cell Properties...

4. In the Table Cell Properties dialog, change the Row Span from 1 to 2

5. Press OK. The following image shows the correction being made to the last header cell, with the corrected header cells to its left.

The following image shows the repaired example table.

This example is shown in operation in the working example of repairing table structure (Word file) and working example of repairing table structure (PDF file).

The following code fragment illustrates code that is typical for a simple table (header row and data row) such as shown in Examples 1-3:

95 0 obj                %Structure element for a table
 << 
  /A 39 0 R
  /K[96 0 R 101 0 R 106 0 R 111 0 R]
  /P 93 0 R
  /S/Table              %standard structure type is table
 >> 
 endobj
96 0 obj                %Structure element for a table row
 << 
  /K[97 0 R 98 0 R 99 0 R 100 0 R]
  /P 95 0 R
  /S/TR                 %standard structure type is table row
 >> 
 endobj
97 0 obj                %Structure element for a table header
 <</A[23 0 R 120 0 R]
   /K 1
   /P 96 0 R
   /S/TH                 %standard structure type is table head
   /Pg 8 0 R
 >> 
endobj
104 0 obj                %Structure element for table data (cell contents)
 << 
  /A 29 0 R
  /K 7
  /P 101 0 R
  /S/TD                  %standard structure type is table data
  /Pg 8 0 R
 >> 
endobj