How do I create "accessible" PDFs from HTML?

Question

Hi

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to generate accessible PDFs (including images) from HTML?

The PDFs need to look like the original HTML, including positions of images etc. Any special HTML structure required to help make the final PDF accessible?

• I've seen questions about creating PDFS none of them specifically address the important issue of accessibility.

My poison of choice is Perl but references to any program, language or library will help.

I have a more in-depth question at TypeDoc if anyone has more general information to offer. http://doctype.com/TiB

Also, I, and others, would find it useful if users with accessibility problems could comment if they find the "usability experience" of using PDFs better or worse than reading from Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH).

Thanks Mike

Answer 1

Look into PrinceXML. Through CSS you can control margins, page breaking and orientation. While not open source, you can try it for free, but it places a small water mark in the upper right corner.

Answer 2

The Adobe ColdFusion server product does a really fine job of this, not surprisingly. But it's not free, and the open source implementations of the language (Smith and BlueDragon) don't support the pdf stuff.

Developer licenses to Adobe ColdFusion are free, and you can download it.

Answer 3

I've done this thing on a small scale but scripting Safari to print to PDFs. I don't recommend it for large-scale projects though.