PDF to Word conversion results in Auto-numbering addition

Curiously, I seem to be having the opposite problem to everyone else. I have a 30-page software user guide in InDesign which needs to be translated into Vietnamese (a language I can't read). For whatever reason, my client has decided to assigned the translation to someone who doesn't have InDesign and wants it in Word (very annoying, because their usual translation service does use InDesign and we have a defined workflow that works very well).

Exporting to Word directly from InDesign was a complete mess, so I tried INDD > PDF > Word, using Acrobat Pro. This worked reasonably well—except that I lost all the heading and paragraph numbers (and bullets)! Which is a massive problem in this case. In InDesign/PDF, all the headings, most of the text paragraphs, plus illustrations and tables, are numbered (multi-level). Since I will need to copy/paste all the Vietnamese text back into InDesign, I had planned to use the numbering as 'signposts' for where each paragraph needs to be pasted. But now I won't be able to do that.

Interestingly, however, all the paragraph stylesheet names appear to have survived the journey from INDD, through Acrobat and into Word. This means I have been able to restore some of the numbering by modifying the stylesheets in Word. But this is still a lot of overhead (since the paragraph numbering constantly needs to be 'restarted' or 'continued' manually, and I can't find any way to restore the separate multi-level list numbering to the headings).

What's really infuriating is that I can see that numbered cross-references, which in InDesign are handled as a separate auto-numbered list, appear in Word as editable text. This seems to suggest that INDD, and/or Acrobat, 'know' how to convert text variables into editable text in Word. In that case, why can't InDesign and/or Acrobat have the options, when exporting to Word, to either remove numbering, or keep it but convert them to static, editable text? 

Well, it is 2023 and this issue has not be changed. I just realized that the auto numbering was happening and looked to see why. What a pain! Please Adobe change this auto feature!! 

To add to what Karl has posted... it's always a surprise with these conversions.  A big variable is that any 2 PDFs can look the same, but be constructed under the skin in very different ways.  So a conversion to another format will yield different results in nearly all cases.  I always assume that there will be some considerable formatting tasks ahead once a PDF is converted to Word.

Good luck!

Dave

As to why this is happening: Acrobat tries to be smart about converting PDF to Word, and if it finds something that looks like an automatically increasing numberr, it may replace that with the auto number field. I don't think you can disable this, but if there would be an option, it would be in Acrobat's preferences under "Convert to PDF", then select one of the Word options (in the current version of Acrobat, there is Word 97-2003 and Word Document).