Lost In Design files. help!

[madeleinec77993157]

Im on third year illustration. I have spent allot of time creating an in design document that is 40 pages long. I have made a mistake and saved it as a pdf, and somehow deleted the in design file. So i'm unable to edit it which I need to do for hand in. and I really don't want to do another one as I put so much work into it. Is there way of using the pdf file I have and opening in on in design so I can work on it again?

[Derek Cross · Accepted solution]

You must always save incrementally named copies of your documents so if (when) you loose a document or there's a corrruption, you can recover your files.

There is a third party InDesign plug-in, at extra cost, that might help: https://www.recosoft.com/products/pdf2id/?gclid=CjwKCAiAn7L-BRBbEiwAl9UtkKHABirITa7Rp5tpF-9N5WxkccBA...

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse · Accepted solution]

Depends on how much you need to do, and how quickly you need it.

If you need to do a few edits, you can place the pages of the PDF into a new document and do overlays of the corrections, then re-PDF the whole thing, or just PDF the changed pages and use Acrobat to swap out the affected pages in your final PDF.

You can also try open the affected pages in Illustrator from the PDF and do spot changes there. The drawback is that the text will be converted into individual objects, but it's not as hard to recreate text than an entire page design.

Otherwise, the best you can do to "save time" is to obtain a tool like the one Derek mentions.