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Scribus => PDF Generation => Topic started by: Baldeagle61 on March 13, 2025, 06:02:10 PM

Title: Accessible PDFs
Post by: Baldeagle61 on March 13, 2025, 06:02:10 PM
Hi all
I'm considering using the scribus app as an alternative to InDesign. So can anyone answer a couple of questions for me?
Can it output bookmarked, structured PDF files like InDesign can?
If so, could these be made to pass all the checks in Acrobat's accessibility checker?
If the answer is no then it's a complete non-starter for me, as 90% of my clients require this.
Title: Re: Accessible PDFs
Post by: Nermander on March 13, 2025, 06:16:33 PM
Most likely not. Scribus was mainly intended for printing.

There may have been some improvements in later versions, but I personally think accessibility and precise typesetting are not really compatible.
Title: Re: Accessible PDFs
Post by: MrB on March 13, 2025, 09:05:08 PM
Scribus does support PDFs with bookmarks, and various other features including javascript etc. I suggest you give it a try. I don't know about the accessibility part but if there's gaps, please show them and we can review about implementing changes.
Title: Re: Accessible PDFs
Post by: Nermander on March 14, 2025, 12:16:59 PM
I think accessibility for example needs text in the PDF to be PDF "stories", I assume also images should have "alt texts" (as it is called in HTML).
Title: Re: Accessible PDFs
Post by: a.l.e on March 14, 2025, 05:48:22 PM
a few moons ago, we had a discussion, where AdmFubar posted a few links on a specific type of accessibility:

Generating ADA-compliant PDFs? (https://forums.scribus.net/index.php/topic,4653)

from what i recall, scribus is far to be able to comply to any accessibility standards.
Title: Re: Accessible PDFs
Post by: OSDP on June 01, 2025, 12:16:54 PM
In this link (https://adacompliance.tips/ada-compliant-pdf/), we can read :

"Image-only PDFs. If the PDF is a scanned document, each page is treated like one big picture. Running OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts scanned text to searchable/taggable/readable text, which makes the document accessible."

So an alternative would be to provide each page as an image? (.png .webp .jpg)?
Title: Re: Accessible PDFs
Post by: OSDP on June 01, 2025, 01:28:28 PM
That work well !
Export your Scribus .pdf (without protection) or image raster with text, and use a convert .pdf/A online tool.
For exemple, this one (https://www.pdfforge.org/online/en/pdf-to-pdfa). Here if you start from a .pdf with hyperlinks, he saved all hyperlinks with by default .PDF/A-3B.
Then, you can download it and verify it here (https://www.pdfforge.org/online/en/validate-pdfa) (if it is well .pdf/A validated).