by David R. Mankin
You couldn't escape it in recent weeks. There was a new plan to reform the United State's health care system. There were screams for the promised transparency. They shoved, pushed, yelled... and the level of rhetoric was feverish.
In an attempt to bring the general public into the arena of discussion, the White House apparently released a PDF in which "Stability & Security for All Americans" was proclaimed.
I had a few problems with the PDF and none of them had anything to do with politics or health care at all. The PDF had the White House's URL at the bottom, but I noticed the URL text was NOT linked. Finding this curious, I inspected the document a bit more closely. By starting Acrobat's Accessibility Quick Check (Advanced > Accessibility > Quick Check), I discovered that the PDF was not tagged and therefore would not pass the government's own "508" standards. (In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.) Imagine that--the White House, at the very TOP of the government's chain of command, did not follow the rules. Curious, huh?
In fairness, I have no way of knowing if this was an official, government-sanctioned flyer. It did not have a digital signature and the Document's properties revealed no metadata pointing back to the document's origin.
So now I was curious about that famous 2000+ page health care bill that has dominated the domestic news reports. The White House promised that the bill would be released for anyone to read... ANYONE. I went searching around the Web for the document and I quickly found links to the bill in PDF format.
I downloaded the PDF and opened it in Acrobat 9 Pro.
As promised, it was more than 2,000 pages (2,409 to be exact). I immediately saw a Digital Certification across the top of the view panel: "Certified by the Superintendent of Documents" at the US Government Printing Office. The PDF was for real.
Two things about the PDF screamed at me immediately. First, it was extremely long. Second (are you ready for this?), the PDF contained no bookmarks. None. There was no way to intelligently read and navigate the document other than to start on page 1 and end at page 2409.
Need to find if the new bill affects retired military's TriCare coverage? No bookmark to help you find it. Care to guess whether this is a tagged document that might meet the government's own criteria for "508 Compliancy"? Nope. Untagged. Unacceptable.
I know one famous address that needs an Acrobat class. Might you too?
You couldn't escape it in recent weeks. There was a new plan to reform the United State's health care system. There were screams for the promised transparency. They shoved, pushed, yelled... and the level of rhetoric was feverish.
In an attempt to bring the general public into the arena of discussion, the White House apparently released a PDF in which "Stability & Security for All Americans" was proclaimed.
I had a few problems with the PDF and none of them had anything to do with politics or health care at all. The PDF had the White House's URL at the bottom, but I noticed the URL text was NOT linked. Finding this curious, I inspected the document a bit more closely. By starting Acrobat's Accessibility Quick Check (Advanced > Accessibility > Quick Check), I discovered that the PDF was not tagged and therefore would not pass the government's own "508" standards. (In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.) Imagine that--the White House, at the very TOP of the government's chain of command, did not follow the rules. Curious, huh?
In fairness, I have no way of knowing if this was an official, government-sanctioned flyer. It did not have a digital signature and the Document's properties revealed no metadata pointing back to the document's origin.
So now I was curious about that famous 2000+ page health care bill that has dominated the domestic news reports. The White House promised that the bill would be released for anyone to read... ANYONE. I went searching around the Web for the document and I quickly found links to the bill in PDF format.
I downloaded the PDF and opened it in Acrobat 9 Pro.
As promised, it was more than 2,000 pages (2,409 to be exact). I immediately saw a Digital Certification across the top of the view panel: "Certified by the Superintendent of Documents" at the US Government Printing Office. The PDF was for real.
Two things about the PDF screamed at me immediately. First, it was extremely long. Second (are you ready for this?), the PDF contained no bookmarks. None. There was no way to intelligently read and navigate the document other than to start on page 1 and end at page 2409.
Need to find if the new bill affects retired military's TriCare coverage? No bookmark to help you find it. Care to guess whether this is a tagged document that might meet the government's own criteria for "508 Compliancy"? Nope. Untagged. Unacceptable.
I know one famous address that needs an Acrobat class. Might you too?
***
About the author: David R. Mankin is a Certified Technical Trainer, desktop publisher, computer graphic artist, and Web page developer. And if that wasn't enough, of course David is an Adobe-certified expert in Adobe Acrobat.
Hm, "no way to intelligently read and navigate" might be an overstatement on your part (or perhaps your definition of "intellegent" is different than mine. I always use Ctrl-F to go straight to the information I want in a PDF. I've never found the author's idea of what might interest me in the form of bookmarks useful.
Posted by: Amy | April 06, 2010 at 09:09 AM
Another awesome post. I am amazed that people do not pay more attention to how their PDFs are produced and how they are consumed.
I am obsessive about bookmarking long documents. I am equally fanatical about hyperlinks, both within and outside of the document.
You don't have to be an Acrobat guru to do this stuff either.
I strongly recommend an education in Distiller settings and how to configure PDF Maker (if you have to) to go to PDF directly from MS Office.
Your readers will love you for it.
We want change!
Dave Howard
http://pointfive.net
@davHwrd
Posted by: DavHwrd | April 07, 2010 at 01:43 AM