This release delivers the most significant capability expansion of the year for Grackle PDF, introducing a fully native OCR engine and guided Wizard, clickable internal Table of Contents navigation, and major stability upgrades across tagging accuracy, layout detection, and file compatibility.
Highlights
- Built-in OCR Engine & Wizard
- Grackle PDF now includes a native optical character recognition engine purpose-built for accessibility remediation, eliminating the need for third-party OCR tools.
- OCR Wizard: Automatically detects scanned pages and guides users through OCR on the current page, selected pages, or the full document.
- Async Batch OCR: Processes multiple pages in the background without blocking the user interface, complete with progress tracking and mid-batch cancellation.
- Mixed-Page Intelligence: Region-aware filtering distinguishes native text from scanned regions, preventing duplicated text layers on pages containing both text and scans.
- Side-by-Side Comparison: Users can validate OCR output against the original document in synchronized left/right panels, edit OCR text placeholders directly, and process rotated pages or Unicode seamlessly.
- Clickable Internal Navigation (TOC Tool)
- The Table of Contents tool now automatically generates interactive internal hyperlinks from each TOC entry to its corresponding heading in the document. This eliminates the manual step of adding TOC links, significantly speeding up remediation workflows for long documents.
- Table Editing & Layout Detection
- Table Scope and Span attributes are now successfully preserved after executing an Acrobat “Save As” function.
- Resolved an issue with the Table Wizard’s “Clear Headers” function to ensure it works reliably.
- Added full Ctrl+Z (Undo) and Ctrl+Y (Redo) support for single and multi-region deletions within Layout Detection.
- File Compatibility
- Enhanced PDF parsing to ensure highly optimized or compressed files (such as complex Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports) open reliably without failure.
Stability Upgrades & Bug Fixes
- Tagging Accuracy & Google Docs Exports
- Fixed an issue where the first H1 heading could be mistakenly absorbed into a list item during Google Docs PDF exports.
- Line-wrapped hyperlinks are now merged into a single link tag with the correct alt text, preventing descriptions from drifting or dropping off.
- Restored correct multi-<P> tag structures for Text Box “Lines” selections.
- Fixed the AutoTagger to ensure figures honor the exact reading order established in Layout Detection.
- Resolved a false positive with the Validator’s MCID inconsistency flag and ensured flagged objects can be easily located in the document.
Who Benefits
- Accessibility professionals & remediators
- A completely self-contained workspace with built-in OCR and automatic TOC hyperlinking that eliminates repetitive manual tasks and cuts down project turnaround times.
- Google Workspace users
- Flawless tag mapping and structural integrity when exporting Google Docs to accessible PDFs.
- All users
- A much more stable, robust application with smarter layout detection and broader compatibility for compressed PDF files.
