PDF to Word Conversion

[ScooterD76]

I use Indesign to create spec sheets, which end up as PDFs. The designer at our sister company uses Word for rebranding ( why, I have no idea) so they are converting my PDFs to word docs. There is some strangeness with the headers and footers coming out with a greyed-out appearance. These are objects in my IND master page and word is creating the headers and footers. Any fix? Does this make any sense?

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

This has nothing to do with InDesign. PDFs are an end product format and while they can be converted, the conversions are never perfect.

[ScooterD76]

This has been the correct answer from the beginning LOL

Going to try some of those other things but it looks like I'll probably be doing these myself now. On a side note, I do a lot of copying and pasting from the sourse documents and i find converting these to word docs seems to retain tabular data better than a PDF. ( pasting to IND)

Thanks for the help!

[Randy Hagan]

It makes sense ... on your end. When it comes to exporting MSWord docs from InDesign, not so much.

There are two ways you can approach this:

1. More work for you, no additional cost (except for time):

• Select the body text from your InDesign document and use the File>Export... menu command it as Rich Text Format (.rtf) file. This will save much of the bold, italic, underline etc. formatting from your InDesign layout.
• Open the file in any word processing program.and copy/paste your headers and footers where you want them. Forward your associate the .rtf files to format in MSWord to suit the sister companhy's needs.

2. Less work for you, but additional expense:

• Buy Recosoft's ID2Office conversion utility. It does a great job (but not perfect, of course) converting InDesign document files into MSWord documents. The files may require a little fine tuning, but nowhere near as much as you're experiencing now.

Bob's steering you right when he says no conversion program will give you perfect, flawless conversions. But if you have to do them anyway, I believe you'll find better results doing them from InDesign than you will trying to make the move from PDF files.

Hope this helps,

Randy

[JR Boulay]

Be sure to check the "Tagged" option when exporting to PDF, the results of converting to Word will be much better.