Opening vs Importing PDFs: Is Native PDF Support Coming to InDesign?

[Roger Breton]

I was told that InDesign's engineers are working on a way to "Open PDF" documents "natively" in InDesign? 

<Title renamed by MOD>

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

Currently in its very early development and available in the beta version of InDesign. It is hardly ready for prime time and only opens PDFs created in InDesign.

[Roger Breton]

Got it, Bob! 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Don't count on it being very useful in any foreseeable future. I'd bet it will take two full ID releases before it's as useful as opening a PDF in Ilustrator, which works but only at the element/erector-set level. And as PDFs can be created in myriad ways, anything like full "editing" is likely to be bound to ones created by ID in the first place, meaning it will be far simpler (and, IMHO, a proper workflow) to just go back to the original INDD file for changes.

PDF was never meant to be editable. Trying to take it to anything like an editable live format is... wrong. Wrongity wrong.

[Roger Breton]

James, thank you for contributing your point of view to this discussion.

As I read your reply, I remembered that, in the early days of InDesign, the idea of InDesign using PDF as its "native document format" was tossed around. 
I think, as a service, InDesign, perhaps ought to allow extracting images out of a PDF as Photoshop does, and, perhaps extracting the text, too. I think those two services would be really useful. Not that I don't like using Photoshop to extract pictures out of a PDF or copying/pasting text out of Acrobat to InDesign, for editing / formatting but using Acrobat itself, at least in the latter years, in my experience, has been somewhat of a challenge, with shortcuts not being on par with those of Illustrator and InDesign. I find it a real pain, sometimes.  But I'll survive 🙂

[Roger Breton]

By the way, the absolute best "PDF editor" I ever used was ORIS PDF Tuner. It's like opening the PDF in Illustrator "natively". Not cheap, though.

[Bill Silbert]

There actually is a third-party plug-in available from Markzware that already allows you to edit a pdf in InDesign. You can find more details at https://markzware.com/products/pdfmarkz/.