PDF/UA 7.1 test 3 false negative (real content vs artifacts)?

[jzuidweg]

The author of test document 19 told me that this document has content which is not tagged. However, it does not raise an error for PDF/UA 7.1 test 3 ('Content is neither marked as Artifact nor tagged as real content').

Is this a false negative?

[MaximPlusov]

Could you clarify what content the author is referring to?

[MaximPlusov]

Acrobat and PAC don't show this error either.

[jzuidweg]

I asked the author about this. He says that according to Acrobat Pro and PAC3, the content of test document 19 is tagged starting from the line "Het college van B&W vergadert op dinsdag." The first three lines of the document starting with "Nieuws van het college van B&W" through "Documentnummer: ZD2203686_3" do not appear to be tagged as content.

See the screenshot from Acrobat Pro: and the screenshot from PAC3:

[MaximPlusov]

Ok. Looks like this content is meant:

It's not tagged actually, but it's marked as Artifact. So it's not 7.1-3 false negative. This error is related to rule "Real content is marked as artifact.", but now this rule isn't checked.

[bdoubrov]

Normally only the author if the document can say whether some content is an artifact or not. I'd say, in this particular example it is obviously real content. So, marking it as an artifact is wrong.

There are several approaches that can be taken to detect such cases:

• (naïve) just report any text marked as artifact as a warning and let the user verify this. The problem here is that for example all page labels will be reported as errors.
• (complex) try recognizing some typical use cases when artifacts are used. Like page header/footer, repeated table headers in the multipage table, line numbers. And exclude them from the naïve approach described above