I am at Macworld in San Francisco and I have seen a product that I guarantee is going to become one of the hottest plug-ins for InDesign. Recosoft Corporation, developers of the PDF2Office family of products has just announced the creation of a PDF to InDesign conversion product that does exactly that! It converts PDF documents into InDesign files. I saw one of the alpha versions of the product in action. The product added an Open PDF file to InDesign’s file menu.
It then pointed to the PDF document and opened it. Text in the PDF was converted to text frames. Images in the PDF were converted to images with a choice of JPEG, TIFF, or PNG.
Platte River Drive • Denver, Colorado 80223. Fax 303-934-6712. Exporting PDF files from. InDesign CS3. PLEASE NOTE: KODAK. Although we can convert them. Some fonts are restricted from being embed- ded in the PDF file by the fonts license. InDesign CS3 / Export to PDF FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION CMYK WORKFLOW. CREATE A PDF. (This new preset will be based on the default PDF/X-1a:2001 preset. Color Conversion: Convert to Destination (Preserve Numbers). • Destination: Document CMYK. • Output Intent Profile Name: Document CMYK.
Vector objects were converted to vector objects (frames) with ID fills and strokes. Activate Neuro Programmer 2 Serial here. There was a setting to map fonts if the fonts in the PDF did not exist on the system. There was a setting to convert just text, or just image, or everything!
And based on my input, the director of engineering said it would be very easy to make it so that annotations in the PDF would also be converted to text on its own layer. The two guys at the Recosoft booth (off on the extreme edge of the show floor in one of those little table booths with curtains) know they have something big. And so does Adobe which sent a contingent of ID people to talk to them. The product won’t be available till about May. The guys promise that it will work on both the current version (CS2) of InDesign as well as any future product that may or may not exist at that time.
I haven’t been this excited about a plug-in since Sree’s Cool Tools for Illustrator 5! I would be extremely wary of using the word “round-tripping.” It’s very unlikely that an ID document saved to PDF and then re-opened using this plug-in would actually be the same. For example, how could they know if a paragraph had Optical or Metric kerning? There’s no way for them to figure out what’s a nested style. That said, I sure wish I had seen the plug-in while I was down there, Sandee! Sounds very cool, and will likely be very useful for many people who need to edit PDF files.