Carl Young’s AcroViews

Here’s an issue I have completely missed. If you enable accessibility and reflow in PDFMaker for Acrobat 7 and 8, you create a hidden layer.

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While accessibility is great, creating hidden layers is not. Many large organizations have standards (including PDF/A) that forbid layers, even hidden and seemingly benign ones ones like accessibility.

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I’ve been able to create hidden layers in the PDFMaker for Acrobat 7 and 8 running inside Microsoft Word 2003. All you have to do is enable accessibility in PDFMaker.

Because the layer is hidden, it doesn’t show up in the Layers Navigation Panel. Your only clue is you have an active option to “flatten layers.” Once you tell Acrobat to flatten the layer, the PDF/A Preflight Profile and our own PDF Validator no longer report a hidden layer.

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Interestingly, in my tests the Full Accessibility Check in Acrobat 8 Pro returns the same results for the files with the hidden layer and after the file is flattened.

Let’s hope Adobe comes up a solution that doesn’t require us to choose between accessibility and meeting standards.

You’ve been reading about it for several weeks, but now you can get your own hands on Acrobat 8. Download it here, and let us know what you think.