Importing docx file into indesign, not working

@defaultov3ej5blkkjy

Why this memoir is in PDF? Can't you get your hands on the source file? 

You have to remember that a PDF is, essentially, merely a container of the print instructions to create a page, and as such has no idea of how the original document was constructed or laid out. More often than not, chunks of text are broken up into individual objects and, whether you use Acrobat's own export-to-Word function, or a sketchy free online tool, both have to GUESS how to put things back together, like how words are spaced and also which blocks of text are part of a paragraph. Better tools do this better than others, but NONE are perfect.

Hi @defaultov3ej5blkkjy:

Here's one more thing to look at: click on the sentence with "butitranaway". Enable Type > Show Hidden Characters and then choose Edit > Edit in Story Editor. This is an unformatted view of the same story. Do you see blue dots between the words?

• If so, that means you're dealing with overrides that are collapsing the spaces. They are easy to remove.
• If not, I would do the PDF to InDesign conversion in Adobe Acrobat, which does a great job these days. I'm assuming you don't already have it since you used a free convertion tool. But you could ask a friend, or download the free 7-day trial, or subscribe for a month. At US$30 for a month, that's well worth it vs trying to fix this manually.

~Barb

The takeaway here is that not all putative Word files are actually fully Word standard or compliant  — most export options from things like Google Docs and Pages and such do just a good enough job that Word itself can usually open the files. But most (I'm tempted to say all) files from these secondary sources and converters are not compatible with InDesign import.

The simple solution is to open any such files in a real copy of Word, and re-save in RTF, DOC and DOCX format under a new name. InDesign will often import one of those much more cleanly than the pretender version.

As Derek notes, using Acrobat Pro to export PDF to Word is one of the more reliable workflows, although it's still a good idea to open the result and do basic tidying and cleanup in Word before saving as a valid Word file set.

I have also seen more than one reference to "spacing issues with Word files" that trace to the file being set for full justification. Select all styles in Word and set them to left justification, and on top of the other fixes above, I'd be surprised if that doesn't clear up the spacing issue.

All that said, keep in mind that PDF does not store most text as absolutely linear flows. Depending on what tool and version created the PDF (and there are many, many second-rate ones), the text may actually have soft or hard returns at the end of each line as it was presented in the PDF. Search and replace to eliminate all soft returns (change to spaces) can help at the technical level, although you'll still have a lot of cleanup formatting and proofreading to do.

There just isn't any really clean way to get text back out of PDF, not without fairly specialized tools that are often too expensive for one-shot use.

Have you tried exporting from the PDF to a Word Doc using Acrobat Pro?