PDF Conversion: Is Adobe really so clueless?

[BoxHouse]

I needed to open an Acrobat PDF in InDesign- THEY ARE BOTH ADOBE PRODUCTS.  The fact that it's 2024 and InDesign cannot open an Acrobat file is bad enough.  But what's worse is that they're bragging about a "new Beta feature" that "converts PDFs to InDesign".  But get this: only if the PDF was created in InDesign.

It would be comical if it were so mind-numbingly indicative of the total lack of effort that Adobe puts forth these days.  There's "resting on your laurels" and then there's this.  

[danpinho]

"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.

[Rick28228113jkp2]

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!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I'd suspect a problem in the PEBCAK module, myself.

As well as confusion over why a can lid doesn't cut as well as a scalpel.

[Rick28228113jkp2]

Which is it? PEBCAK or application? Seems like you're the one confused, James.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Oh, they're not exclusive conditions.

You're confusing more than one significant issue, here. Have you read even this thread or did you just jump to the first match to post your complaint?

[Mike Witherell]

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.

[Rick28228113jkp2]

That makes sense, Mike. Thank you for the insight. What doesn't make sense (to me, anyway) is why you would even include a feature in your application that delivers substandard results. Why make a "convert" function available if you're going to convert to (or invite the layperson to convert to) a crap-quality output?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

"include a feature in your application that delivers substandard results"

There are limits to what is possible. Considering what little there is in a PDF to begin with (merely print/display instructions) the fact they can do ANYTHING with it is still much closer than doing it all from scratch. None of the other companies making conversion tools are also against the same constraints. It's like OCR programs... some work better in some ways than others, but none are perfect.

If you are expecting perfection from this is ludicrous.

[Mike Witherell]

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! 

[Bill Silbert]

I posted a link in this thread last June (https://markzware.com/products/pdfmarkz/) about a Markzware plug-in that will convert a PDF into an editable InDesign document. Since then I have installed that plug-in and have found it to really do a very good job in the conversion. Until Adobe perfects their version of PDF conversion I've found that this plug-in will do very nicely, thank you.

[Joel Cherney]

Personally, I'd bet on no PDF conversion tool ever handling everything perfectly. This PDF-to-InDesign beta feature we're talking about only applies to PDFs made with InDesign, right? It won't work on PDFs out of Word or AutoCAD or Canva or Illustrator. 

I've never used the Markzware plugin, but once upon a time I got fairly familiar with the output from the Recosoft PDF2ID tool. However, it wasn't my licence but my client's, and I didn't like the price-performance ratio enough to pick up a license.  Sometimes the output was excellent, but it wasn't consistent, because the input files themselves were not consistently well built. 

My preferred tool these days is actually the leguptools.com service. The output from it can be... pretty rough, to be honest. However, it only costs $0.25 per page, so for my own personal purposes where recreating stuff from PDF is a task I face irregularly, the price/performance ratio is Just Fine. I look back at almost every conversion and say to myself "That was money well spent." Only very rarely have I e.g. spent four bucks on a conversion and said to myself afterwards "useless, like pouring a perfectly good coffee right down the drain." 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Let's just encourage Adobe to make a full-fledged INDD file viewer. 😐

That way no production, distribution, spec, comp or email document would ever be left behind again, whether you created it or not.