PDF Conversion: Is Adobe really so clueless?

Rick,

I was underwhelmed with the beta version with its ability to open and convert PDF to InDesign. It is a great concept.

So far, I note that it needs to pull all the text fragments into a unified textframe. And 99% of the usefulness is cooking out a set of usable paragraph styles, which it seems not to know how to do yet.

But who knows? Maybe they will refine/improve it and eventually release it out of beta.

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/convert-pdf-to-indesign-file.html

In the meantime, I can usually recreate a fresh document just by eyeballing the PDF. I can guess margins and columns pretty accurately, or let Acrobat Pro measure them for me.

2nd, the export to Word docx in Acrobat Pro isn't bad at all. Word tinkering can rebuild a basic set of styles pretty quickly.

3rd, although I forget exactly where it is located, a user of Acrobat Pro can export all at once all the bitmap pixel images into a folder. That's genuinely useful.

4th, to retrieve the occasional vector logo or lineart, a user of Acrobat Pro can right-click and Edit With straight into Illustrator and therefore salvage the vector art.

Those are a few tricks I've picked up while struggling with the problem of not having the originating file.

And BTW, a phone call is still a useful tool for finding the originating InDesign document! 

Forgotten in the mists of time is the fact that Acrobat PDF was conceived as something deliberately NOT editable in order to protect the copyright and originality of a published piece. They took a philosophical position to NOT make a PDF easy to change. This was a fundamental tenet to the origins of a "paperless" document.

It's a rather ingenious marketing strategy to offer "budget" tools that deliver an end-product that's so bad, you have to upgrade. Here's another example: My support person has AcrobatPro, but the jpg and png conversions she generates in the application from designer-rendered, high-res PDFs are atrocious. I do the same with Photoshop, however, and viola!

"Is Adobe really so clueless" and "THEY ARE BOTH ADOBE PRODUCTS"

OP is so wrongfully entitled. Kudos to all the members who politely explained how this planet works to him.

Originally, PDFs were to be final output files. 

They were never intended to be edited.

A lot of people got into a practice of opening PDFs in Illustrator to edit them. 

Which is wrong, Illustrator is NOT a PDF editor.

You can make massive amounts of edits to a PDF using Acrobats editing feature.

You can edit text, you can use Edit With - and select an application and open a selection in that program - make the edit, save it and it updates in the PDF.

That is - text you can edit in Illustrator - vector images also. Raster images you can edit in Photoshop and completely replace them with another image, or make any edit you like.

There are other tools that can edit PDFs.

But InDesign is not one of those tools - why - cos InDesign is the layout application - not the editor. 

There seems to be a need of many to do this - so Adobe is making strides to address these issues. 

Others mentioned other plugins etc. 

Affinity can open PDFs and make edits - that's something they did. 

Illustrator can (but you shouldn't) open PDFs.

PDF structures vary.

If the PDF was created from Illustrator with editing capabilities when saving the PDF - it's fine to open - in Illustrator as it's structure is saved that way.

If the PDF was created in InDesign - then opening it in Illustrator will cause Illustrator to interpret InDesigns PDF structure in it's own.

Think of it like interpreting a different language. Some things will be lost in translation. 

I live in Ireland, and we speak English, but I called a mechanic literally the other day, and he had a thick 'country' accent - and if you've ever seen 'Snatch' with Brad Pitt, you'll know what I'm talking about. I couldn't understand a word of English coming out of him. It was very difficult to have a basic conversation in English - even though we apparently speak the same language. 

I guess the comparison I'm making is that even though both programmes are made in the same language, they have their own dialects, built up over time, by different teams, people come and go, engineers make binary decisions, it's either 1 or 0, a feature is on or off, etc. 

I wouldn't imagine the Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign/Acrobat team sit in the same room and collaborate on way features are going to work.

Anyway - you can edit a PDF - just not the way you want to - yet.

But it's getting there.

It's 2024. 
AI is here. 
Adobe are embracing it.
We can't change the past.
We can only look to the future.

"I needed to open an Acrobat PDF in InDesign"

A PDF is purely an export format container of the instructions for printing or viewing a page... from ANY program that creates them. There is no longer ANY structure within that file that has anything useful that InDesign (or any program) can read or open back into their native format*.

It's analogous to having a complicated multi-layered Photoshop file that you then flatten down to a simple JPG and then wanting to get all that layered data back from the JPG. Ain't gonna happen.

Yes, Acrobat and other PDF editors can attempt to reconstruct the intended look of a file, but it's literally a guessing game, things like "are all these words here part of a paragraph?"... and what the new Beta option to convert PDFs in ID is no different, if only going to be a bit smarter with AI tech to "guess" better.

*There are exceptions to this, like in Illustrator/Photoshop, where you CAN attach the native file along with the PDF portion, but that comes at the cost of considerable file size, which is usually not what you want in a PDF.

I am just guessing here, but the reason for that limitation is probably because future InDesign will add tags and other hidden meta information in an exported PDF that will allow it to be opened mostly intact in future InDesign (similar to what Illustrator does - include an Illustrator file stream alongside the PDF one). Lacking that additional meta information InDesign wouldn't know how to interpret all PDF parts and maintain styles, etc..

That said, I have been using PhotoLine's and Affinity Publisher's PDF import for a long time, and I have to say it really is a perk when working with layouts and import of files from others. It isn't always a perfect conversion and of course depends on whether the fonts (that are used in the PDF) are available on your system to ensure the best result. It also doesn't know how to create paragraph/char styles, of course. Important stuff such as images running into bleed may not be present.

Yet it is a really nice convenience feature, and I've used it with clients who provided me with a PDFs exported from non-printer friendly software as well as text processing software such as Word to make quick conversions that are editable afterwards. I regard it as an efficient extra tool in the toolbox to assist in the workflow of working with layouts and (more importantly) working with external assets. I import PDF files all the time for editing and grabbing resources in these apps. A time-saver indeed because PDF files are ubiqutious and often easily accessible. 🙂

So I do agree an option to import any PDF for conversion to editable pages and text would be very useful to have in InDesign even if conversion can be problematic in cases and depends on the user case and context.

Affinity Publisher and PhotoLine prove to me that it is a handy feature that tremendously speeds up these kind of conversion tasks or where one merely wants to import the resources of a PDF directly in one step (maintaining scale and positioning of separate elements) rather than having to go through a secondary or even tertiary design app.

To the OP - I completely understand the frustration, but to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, there may be more than meets the eye.

I've a feeling when the PDF is made from Adobe InDesign, there may be a certain structure that's kept in the PDF that future versions of InDesign will understand and be able to translate the PDF back to InDesign... but PDFs made elsewhere may not have that syntax and as a result wouldn't import properly and would result in a poor conversion.  My guess is that they're trying to make the PDF->ID conversion as seamless as possible so items made in the original ID file such as styles, layers, parent pages, threaded text etc are maintained.

Ideally, what I think would be better is a prompt that at least said that the PDF wasn't made in InDesign, but at least attempt a conversion, and what you get, you get... warts and all (like OmniMarkz from Markzware currently). However that is better done as a suggestion to the InDesign developers over at indesign.uservoice.com

That said, competitor software that opens PDFs natively isn't without its own issues. Mike Rankin has a 40 minute Youtube video where he highlights the issues with such a conversion. Similarly, Markzware's OmniMarkz product isn't a turnkey solution but does allow for other conversion avenues, particularly ID to Illustrator - something I'm doing a lot of as the ESKO plugins work in Illustrator only.

With all of that out of the way, don't think I'm cheerleading here... if you've read my blog back in October 2023 you'll see two pieces that were critical of the 2024 release – the first post was a parody piece highlighting fake features that weren't actually implemented (but arguably should be), and the second post was why I made the parody piece (TL:DR - to highlight what could have been).

To their credit, the InDesign team did implement one of these fake features, and not as a major release but as a minor patch (i.e. add Firefly content to InDesign) and actively promoting the upcoming feature of the PDF conversion in the beta.

At the same time though, this is very early days of the PDF->ID conversion, so with further input from the community via the indesign.uservoice.com page, perhaps the team will heed the user feedback.

Hi @BoxHouse 

Unfortunately, my answer won't help either. But InDesign is a layout programme and NOT a PDF editor.

Counter question: can you turn an omelette back into eggs?

Or to stick with software:
For example, can you convert a JPEG back into a native, editable format with all layers (unless the PDF was saved in Photoshop with this option)?

No. That is not possible.

Yes, there are workarounds that can help. But that's all.

If you download the beta version of InDesign 19.4, you can open some types of PDFs in InDesign. Or you can use a third-party tool: Leguptools, Markzware, Recosoft all offer conversion from PDF to InDesign. However, whichever method you use you'll find the conversion isn't perfect, but should save you time compared to rebuilding from scratch.