Keep tags when merging or splitting PDFs

[gardenberg]

Hi,

I have used PDFsam Basic for some time to merge and split PDF-files. It works great!

However, lately the readers of the PDFs have become more attentive to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). After merging and splitting a PDF with PDFsam, a test with PDF Accessiblity Checker (PAC) reveals that the previously existing tags or tag tree seems to be stripped from the document.

Is there a way to retain the tag structure / tag tree of the original PDFs in the newly merged (or splitted) PDF, similar to how bookmarks can be kept or created?

I am happy to provide documentation on request, should you find this issue of interest.

Some googling reveals this to be an issue in editors such as Adobe Pro as well, feature request might be the correct label.

[torakiki]

There is no flag or feature at the moment to deal with that at the moment. It doesn't seam like a trivial feature but sure, if you have some sample file we could take a look and see what's the effort.

[gardenberg]

Thank you. I'll upload the files here, but just let me know if you'd prefer it somewhere else.

The files "Chapter.pdf" Chapter.pdf , "Appendix 1.pdf" (Appendix 1.pdf) and "Full text.pdf" (Full text.pdf) are pdfs generated using Microsoft Words "Save as pdf" feature.

PDF Accessibility Checker identifies 168 tags in the "Full text.pdf"-document

PAC identifies 48 tags and 115 tags for the separate files. PAC is a pretty established program where I work, but YMMV. As I do not know what tools are common or safe to use for checking this kind of thing, I won't link any "online free accessiblity checkers here" for reproducability.

After merging "Chapter.pdf" and "Appendix 1", the same test with PAC returns no tags:

The same happens when splitting "Full text.pdf":

Attached also the output produced by PFDsam:

PDFsam_merge.pdf
1_PDFsam_Full text.pdf