Mapping InDesign text styles to PDF tags
Paragraph and character styles were introduced with the very first version of Adobe InDesign back in the previous millennium, in the year 1999 – a long time ago! The styles then served mostly as a tool to apply consistent physical formatting to headings and body text. Font style, size, and color, along with paragraph alignment, spacing, and some more detailed options for hyphenation, keep options, and so on were the main concerns for designers. Grouping paragraphs with a style label made formatting and editing long documents so much easier. When a style was adjusted, so was all the text formatted using the same style.
When digital communication became standard, styles increasingly became important in mapping the meaning of printed paragraph text to an online coded text equivalent. For example, the Head 1 style would become an H1 tag when exported to .pdf
or .html
. This is how the functionality of styles expanded to address accessibility...