Is it possible to create a tagged pdf with apple pages?

> Is it possible to create a tagged PDF with Apple Pages?

Short answer: No, Apple chose at the introduction of Mac OS X to support only Adobe PDF 1.3 and those parts of Adobe PDF 1.4 that include device-independent transparency, but not those parts of Adobe PDF 1.4 that include Adobe XMP for XML markup of the page description program.

Long answer: Adobe PostScript is a page description programming language, unlike Xerox Interpress which is a page and document description programming language. In other words, Adobe PostScript is a streaming or sequential rendering model that cannot simulate the behaviour of a bound book where the user can turn from any one page to any other page arbitrarily. Adobe introduced Acrobat Distiller in 1993 in order to convert Adobe PostScript page description programs into Adobe PDF page and document description programs that share the same fundamental functionality as Xerox Interpress.

Conversion from Adobe PostScript to Adobe PDF buys one nothing but page-independent processing. Specifications published by Adobe in 1993 state how the SFNT Spline Font file format used by Apple and Microsoft for Unicode imaging has to be re-encoded into PostScript font program dictionary format (PostScript so-called simple fonts with less than 256 glyphs and PostScript so-called complex fonts (CID fonts) which are simple fonts tiled into a single superfont). All that is left is the glyph identifiers, and per Unicode Specification version 1.0 the glyph identifiers are private and font-dependent, so no character information can be inferred.

ISO 19005:2005 PDF/A is a superset of ISO 15930:2002 PDF/X-3. The problem with ISO 15930:2002 PDF/X-3 is the same as above, that is, Adobe PostScript cannot encode the file format of the International Color Consortium, which has to be re-encoded to PostScript CSA Color Space Arrays and PostScript CRD Color Rendering Dictionaries. It is possible to encode the ICC file format directly in PDF 1.3 and higher, as specified in ISO 15930 and ISO 19005, but because PDF encodes only the glyph identifiers that are the output of the SFNT file format, and not the UCS Universal Character Set input and the settings for the feature selectors in the font file, ISO 19005:2005 has come under criticism for failing to support search in complex scripts.

ISO 19005:2011 is supposed to address the shortcomings by saving the UCS input into the PDF itself, but in this case it is impossible to use Adobe PostScript and Adobe Acrobat Distiller as intermediates to Adobe PDF. So in order to drive ISO 19005:2011 Adobe would have to ditch Adobe Acrobat. I am not sure if there is software that implements ISO 19005:2011, but I noted that the Apple iBook Store does not accept PDF at all. Personally, I struggle to think of how to explain to endusers the overwhelming number of Adobe ISO PDF formats (there is PDF/E, PDF/UA and whatever else), and the overwhelming number of Adobe ISO PDF versions of these formats (there is ISO 19005:2005, ISO 19005:2011, ISO 15930 all the way back to 1999/2000 in God knows how many versions at this point).

Best wishes,

Henrik Holmegaard

would-be technical writer

To create tagged pdf, use OpenOffice instead of Pages:

http://webaim.org/techniques/ooo/