Problems with exported file from Acrobat to InDesign

Thanks everyone with your suggestions. I finally just exported the images from Acrobat and rebuilt the document, once I figured out what order the images were exported which was left-to-right and top-to-bottom. About 2/3 finished dropping in 500 images.

John

Maybe you'll have better luck opening your PDF in Illustrator then copy-pasting to InDesign. For your particular purpose it may (or may not) produce some better manageable contents.

InDesign shows where an anchor point is in the text with a 'yen' symbol, like this:

To move anchored objects around freely, you need to change the anchor type to "Custom" and not "Inline." Anchoring gets a bit complicated with the various settings, anchor and alignment points, text wrap and all that. But it shouldn't be hard to rearrange your items by dragging each anchor to a new anchor point and adjusting the Anchor settings.

And unless there's a need to have these objects flow from page to page, you don't really need to use anchoring at all. You can position graphic and text frames any way you like, use Align/Distribute to line them up, and avoid all the issues of anchoring altogether if the items are simply meant to stay together on one page.

Anchoring is for two purposes: to keep objects with designated text as flow through a document changes, and to hook objects into the text flow for things like EPUB export. It's not needed for graphical page-by-page layout.

I have a PDF file that is 11x17 and have exported it from Acrobat as a MS-Word file and placed it in InDesign 2021 version 16.4.3.166 so I can move things around to make it 8-1/2 x 11.

That's a tough workflow. Hopefully the Word export from Acrobat is good enough to make it faster to revise it than it would be to rebuild from the ground up. Word exports from Acrobat work halfway decently in Word, if the source file was a Word file.

When I select an image, it shows an anchor, but I don't know what it is anchored to

Try View -> Extras -> Show Text Threads. It'll draw a dotted line from your anchored image to the point at which it's anchored. But I'd bet that the fact that these images are anchored is not critical to your design, so you might be better off simply using Object -> Anchored Object -> Release, then just moving the object around with the Selection tool as usual.