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Question

PDF to Indesign

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
July 23, 2025
4 replies
759 views

Hello,

I have pdf files for which the source Indesign files were lost. I found this interesting tutorial on how to convert pdf files to indesign directly from the program.

https://www.adobe.com/learn/indesign/web/convert-pdf-to-indesign-document?learnIn=1

Unfortunately in my fully updated Indesign it does not work, even with the file provided as an exercise. Do you have any ideas what needs to be done for this to work?

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Thanks so much for confirming the details and for testing it on different systems. I am not able to reproduce this with my PDFs.

To look into this further with the team, could you please share one of the PDFs that isn't opening for you? You can either attach a sample that's not confidential here, or if it contains sensitive content, feel free to send it to me via DM on the community.

Once we have the file, we'll test it on our end and see what's going wrong.

Looking forward to your update!

Abhishek

BobLevine

Community Expert

I don't think it's the PDFs since PDF is not showing as a valid file type for opening. Seems to be something unique to that install.

BobLevine

Community Expert

Fully updated? The current version of InDesign is 20.4.1 so first you'll need to confirm that.

Secondly, doesn't work tells us very little. What exactly happens when you use the file>open command and choose the PDF to open?

E

elisabettab1798902Author

Participating Frequently

The system is fully updated in both the operating system and Adobe programs.

The only thing that happens when I open the file, there is no pdf among the readable formats so I have to force indicating all type of files.

BobLevine

Community Expert

If you're fully updated to 20.4.1 and PDF is not showing as a file type that can be opened, the first thing to do is trash your preferences.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @elisabettab1798902,

Thanks for the details. To better understand what might be going wrong, could you please confirm the version of your operating system and the exact version of InDesign you're using? Also, when you try the steps in the tutorial, are you seeing any error message or does the option simply not appear at all?

If possible, it would be really helpful if you could share a short screen recording showing your workflow up to the point where the issue occurs. Also, does this happen with all your PDFs or just with a specific file?

Let me know, and I'll gladly check this further.

Abhishek

E

elisabettab1798902Author

Participating Frequently

Hello Abhishek,

These are the system details:

Windows 11 Enterprise 64 bit

Version: 23H2

The Indesign version is 20.4.1 x64

When I open the file, whether I drag it or open it from the menu, simply the program does nothing and returns no error message.

This happens with my pdfs, with my colleagues' pdfs, and even with the tutorial author's pdf.

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

There is a third party plug-in available from Markzware called PDFMarkz that does a really good job of converting a pdf back into a fully functioning InDesign file. I have tested it and been really impressed with the conversion. See https://markzware.com/products/pdfmarkz/ for more information.

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