Exporting InDesign files to Word while retaining style names

[Michele S Jennings]

I have to create technical documents for my company. Originals come from Word, they're placed into InDesign 2024 and formatted for our branding. I Share for Review with editors through InDesign. Once approved, I export an interactive PDF (which gets posted in our online store for people to purchase).

Because our technical standards have to be reviewed and revised by multiple people who only have Microsoft Word, I have to provide an archival version of the document in Word.  So, I open the PDF in Acrobat Pro and export to Microsoft Word. While the formatting "look" comes through (including page breaks), none of the original style names are there. The next time the Word files come back to me, I can't just flow it in and have it automatically format because the styles are no longer there to match what's in InDesign, I then have to apply styles again, which is double work.

I can export RTF from InDesign then open the RTF in Word and the style names are there, but the layout isn't close and I have to spend a lot of time to get it close.

I can copy the text out of InDesign and paste it into Word, the text looks right, but the style names aren't applied to the text, so I have the same problem as I do going from PDF export to Word--I have to apply the styles again to retain the names.

Is there an easy answer for this (other than ID2Office, which is expensive)?

[Linda24415233u1d0]

then export from PDF to word