Thanks, Tilman I reviewed both images with PAC. They are by no means “clean”. But I don’t see any errors or warnings related to the areas of the PDF I know are causing the issue with the “Artifact” elements.
I’ve tried to link them on google drive. Hope thay’re accessible: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CmRKObEDGxkBjm8wOsCoN0MuMaDFz0w1/view?usp=sharing, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XAz1650PYY16CPmUhoPRTDKgc_Q4HVpR/view?usp=sharing I have started to try to debug the loading of the PDF, but it’s quite an overwhelming task when completely new to the codebase. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do. Happy to do as much as necessary, but I’m at a bit of a loss where to turn next. Thanks Mark From: Tilman Hausherr <[email protected]> Sent: 12 September 2025 04:25 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Issue with Tagged PDF with Artifact elements in the Structure Tree - artifact not in its parent's list of children [EXTERNAL] Hi, You need to upload the PDFs to a sharehoster. The best would be that you check your PDF with PAC: https://pac.pdf-accessibility.org/en/download Tilman Am 11.09.2025 um 18:40 schrieb Mark Gibson: Hi We have some PDFs that are directly exported from Excel. They export as accessible – tagged pdfs with structure tree. Within the structure tree are elements of type “Artifact”, often used for non-content aspects like background colors, etc. When PDFBox (both v2 and v3) reads these PDFs (visible using the PDFBox Debugger as seen in attached png, as well as just straight up in code), there seems to be a structure tree discrepancy with some parent-child relationships. The Artifact element (found in the structure tree) has a pointer back to its parent. That parent has a list of children. I’d expect that list of children to include the Artifact. However, artifacts are never in their parent’s list of children. I’m trying to find out if this is expected and part of the PDF spec, or a bug in PDFBox. This is currently causing issues for us in FOP when we’re rendering accessible PDF outputs – when importing these PDF image files, the import fails and never show up in final PDF output. Ultimately, I’m trying to understand if the fix should be in PDFBox or FOP. I’ve attached two example PDFs, along with an image of the structure tree of one of them highlighting the issue. Many thanks Mark [cid:[email protected]] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
