Convert PDF to INDD

Some observations on this topic …

Ironically, in the early beta test builds of what became InDesign, in fact one was able to not only place PDF, but also open PDF. The feature was very quickly “pulled” since it was exceptionally difficult to guarantee a reasonable mapping of any arbitrary PDF content to the structure of an InDesign document. And this was before transparency even entered the PDF imaging model!

Illustrator tried to support round-tripping by using PDF as a container for private data which is the real Illustrator format. Thus, if you save an Illustrator file as PDF and select the editability option (not available with all PDF export options), the resultant PDF file effectively contains two files, one the actual final form PDF content and the other, the private Illustrator file format which is ignored by Acrobat. However, if you edit the PDF file in Acrobat, those changes don't get reflected in the Illustrator content. To make matters worse, this has led many to believe that Adobe Illustrator is a general purpose PDF editor, which it absolutely isn't. (I discuss that in detail in other threads!) Simply stated, the PDF imaging model is much more complex than the features supported by Adobe Illustrator.

The same issue but with even more complications would be true if InDesign was to support a private-data-within-PDF file save feature. Why? InDesign supports fewer features of the full PDF imaging model than even Illustrator does (although it does support documents with more than one color space).

The likelihood of Adobe providing a PDF conversion to InDesign feature within InDesign (or Acrobat) is exceptionally low due to the literal impossibility of doing a full conversion versus customer expectations.

Personally, I would recommend the third party plug-in or utility route for casual PDF to InDesign conversion, understanding that a 100% conversion of arbitrary PDF to InDesign is literally impossible.

          - Dov