On behalf of Adobe …
Yes, InDesign documents created under older versions of InDesign will open in the current version of InDesign assuming:
(1) The older version of InDesign was in fact a publicly released version of InDesign as opposed to a “beta version” of InDesign (such versions should never have been used for any production work by Adobe customers and not distributed beyond selected Adobe beta test customers).
(2) The InDesign document was not corrupted in any way under the older version of InDesign.
In terms of correctly opening, there are a few other factors:
(1) You must either have all the original fonts used by the InDesign document when running under the older InDesign version either installed on your system or in the case of packaged InDesign documents, in the Document fonts subdirectory of the package directory. Otherwise you will receive dialogs indicating either missing or wrong version fonts for which you will need to make appropriate adjustments.
(2) Make sure that all placed content such as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, etc. files are located in the locations expected by the InDesign document. If these placed files are “newer” than the InDesign document of yore, you may need to update the links. If the files are in different locations, you will need to find and relink those placed files.
(3) There have been some slight adjustments to InDesign's line layout over the years. For longer line lengths and small type sizes, you may find some layout changes. You should check for these after otherwise successfully opening the older file in a newer version. The layout has been fairly stable over the last several releases (but at least one set of changes has occurred since the CS3 version of InDesign).
To put you at ease, be aware that I and other InDesign users often open complex InDesign documents much older than CS3 vintage including InDesign 1.0 documents with no problems whatsoever.
- Dov
- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
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