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Well, for those of you who are curious, there's been a flurry of off-list activity. Sadly, it's been more of the "sound and fury, signifying nothing"-type activity. No solutions, workarounds, or soon-to-be-released patches. Bah! Humbug... --Mark Storer Software Engineer Cardiff Software #include <disclaimer> typdef std::disclaimer<Cardiff> Discard; > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Mark Storer > Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 3:01 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [PDFdev] Tab order in Acrobat 6.0 > > > > PDFdev is a service provided by PDFzone.com | http://www.pdfzone.com > _____________________________________________________________ > > I've got a tab-order problem. > > We've got this customer who has whipped up a beast of a form in our > software. 54 pages of some of the densest form I've ever had > the misfortune > of encountering. I weep for the poor wretches forced to fill > it out. But I > digress. > > Our software tags everything with marked content, primarily for > accessibility reasons. US Gov't contracts now require > accessibility and > when we're one of the few companies creating accessible > forms, that's a real > advantage. > > Until Acrobat 6 runs face-first into the brick wall that is this form. > > One of the new page-level keys introduces in the last version > or two of the > PDF spec is the "/Tabs" key. Its presence or absence can have several > meanings: > Missing: Use the default annotation order *. <-- note the asterisk > R: Row order > C: Column order > S: Structure order... use the StructParent values to > determine tab order. > > Row and column order are both just fine. Works great. But we have an > explicit tab order that we'd like obeyed, and is independant > of reading > (structure) order. > > *: In Acrobat 6, they introduced an accessibility-related > preference setting > "Use document structure for tab order when no explicit tab order is > specified". This setting is on by default, meaning that there is an > implicit "/Tabs /S" on every page, overriding our desired tab > order. More > than a little frustrating, all by itself. Yes, people can change that > setting, but how many people will ever look at that > accessibility setting > page, much less know to turn it off (without some prodding on > our part, > which still won't help some people). > > And on that monster form, Acrobat 6 is excruciating. Tabbing > between fields > is painfully slow. The "/ParentTreeNextKey" indicates that > there are 3038 > different marked content elements. Yow. > > But I fail to see WHY it's so slow. Sure, there's a lot of > MC in there, but > so what? Each annotation has a "/StructParent", an integer > indicating which > structure element to use. AND THEY'RE IN ORDER. Already > sorted. Ready to > go. So why does Acobat 6 even care how many entries are > present when it > already has this order at the page level. Frustrating. > > Acrobat 5 is fine. Snappy as anyone could ask for. All this > is on a dual > 2.2ghz machine... so I wouldn't expect anything Adobe could > reasonably doing > could make this beast blink... but there it is. > > So I tried a couple different guesses at what might fool > Acrobat 6 into > taking the annotation order, to no avail. > > I guess I'm hoping for one of two resonses to this email: > > 1) Someone knows something I don't about some undocumented > feature (or a > documented one that I missed) that will allow us to either > change the user > preferences, or trick Acrobat 6 into ignoring our structure. > > 2) Adobe saying: "Hey, we missed something. We'll introduce > a new /Tabs > setting in our next patch to explicitly set the tab order to > annotation > order". Or at least "Wow. That IS slow. We'll speed that > up for ya". > > Any takers? > > I can make the form available on request. It's a bit over 3 megs. It > doesn't SEEM big, does it? > > --Mark Storer > Software Engineer > Cardiff Software > #include <disclaimer> > typdef std::disclaimer<Cardiff> Discard; > > > To change your subscription: > http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/lists-pdfdev.html > To change your subscription: http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/lists-pdfdev.html
