How to Convert a Mac PDF to InDesign on PC Despite Geographical Limitations

You signed an NDA when you signed up for the prerelease program, so you shouldn't discuss prerelease software in a public forum. Go to the prerelease forum.

I tried the new PDF-to-ID beta feature recently. One of its limitations (among many limitations) is the PDF had to have come from InDesign originally, or else it cannot operate on trying to reconstruct it. While PDF to InDesign is a wonderful concept, the beta feature I tried out recently does not satisfy the need. What good is a reconstructed page with hundreds of individual words each one in their own textframe? What good is the feature if it is so choosy about where the PDF originally came from?

But, whereas this beta feature is underwhelming, all is not lost.

Using Acrobat Pro, a person can export all the text as a word.docx. It works pretty well, and you can tame, cleanup, and restyle that text further both in Word and/or in InDesign.

Further, one can export all the images --at once-- into a folder where these assets are named and numbered sequentially, thus giving you correctly sized and rezzed images to rebuild with. That is a surprising trick within Acrobat that is easy to overlook.

Vector artwork in your PDF can simply be right-clicked and edited into Illustrator where you can now save the assets as an .AI file. To my awareness, that has to be done one-at-a-time, but it works.

Given that you can discern much from a PDF such as page size, margins, columns, and text typeface and point sizes and leading values, all these hints allow you to generate a new document and new paragraph and character styles. It rebuilds quite quickly.

I just saw the following note right now:

Note: This is a geographically limited rollout. Currently, Converting PDF to InDesign File is only available to users in English in United States of America and United Kingdom.

So this could be my problem... 😞 I'm from Hungary.