*** From the Archives ***
This article is from September 17, 2007, and is no longer current.
Recosoft Ships PDF2ID Conversion Tool
A.L. wrote:
I had an InDesign file that I saved as a PDF. By accident, I saved over that file with other content. Is there a way I can get the content from the PDF back into an InDesign file?
You are in luck! Earlier this year, Sandee Cohen alerted us to a new plug-in that would convert PDF files to InDesign files… but it wasn’t ready to be released Last week, while I was in Tokyo, Recosoft finally shipped this very cool and useful tool, called PDF2ID.
It’s quite astonishing to see a PDF opened in InDesign. You literally just choose File > Open PDF File, set up the Options dialog box, and click OK. The more complex the document, the longer it takes to convert, of course, but a 10-page document made of mostly text and a couple of images opened in about 15 seconds.
As was pointed out in the earlier post, PDF2ID isn’t meant for round-tripping your documents. Remember that a huge amount is lost whenever you create the PDF. For example, there’s no way a PDF file will “remember” your paragraph and character styles, so all the formatting is applied to text locally. The PDF doesn’t really understand how text flows from place to place on your page in most PDF files, so the plug-in has to guess. The result is a lot of unthreaded text frames.
However, even with its limitations, PDF2ID is far better than having to rebuild a document from scratch! And this may finally give people a way to “import” content from other formats. For example, someone could export a PDF from a MS Publisher document, open the PDF in InDesign, and then do some clean-up.
One of the most interesting things about this plug-in is that it imports some of Acrobat’s comments/annotations on to a new layer in the document. That can also be very helpful in some cases.
If you get a chance to try this plug-in, please leave your comments about it below!
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I’ve been waiting with bated breath for this plugin. I just have to convince the powers to be to purchase it.
The way I was converting PDF’s into InDesign was by Exporting it as RTF and then some clean up in Word, then import to InDesign. With some unexpected work and a little help from some very nice people here I got workable files out of it. But it was a nightmare in fairness.
I just bought the plugin, overall it looks very promising and does great work. One place that it has already bit me, though is fonts. I had a PDf that my customer subset the fonts and it changed the name of them, basically it converted the first letter of the font name to some random letter. When I converted it, it basically said it couldn’t convert the font names, and replaced everything it couldn’t read with my default text font. I had no way of finding what it was supposed to be, or using Find Font, to replace those, without comparing frame by frame with the PDF. Incidentally, it was a supplied PDF, that had some changes that would have been very minor with the original InDesign file, but they didn’t have it and didn’t want to bother contacting the designer they had build the file, so I got to do in 90 minutes what would have taken about 10 with the original file.
Daniel, check out the Fonts section of the Open PDF dialog box (if I recall, it’s hidden in a pop-up menu). I noticed some font weirdness, too, but using the dialog box options to set the font mapping seemed to help a lot.
Thanks, I’ll check that out.
That did make it MUCH better, thanks so much for alerting me to that dialog box. I didn’t even realize it was there.
Ok I’m on the brink of getting this as I’m fed up. Basically there’s a bunch of PDFs on a website that we are allowed to use for our website but they can’t be PDF and we need to change all the styles into something managable for our offsite web company. They dont’ like the PDF style naming of CM+147 and et al style names, so we have to break them down.
Every single one has to be converted. Are we in the water without a paddle or what?
Oh and by the way, we have to supply all the PDFs as RTFs with all styles simplified, like, H1, H2, H3, P, em, strong etc.
I’ve started doing this with the Preserve Local Formatting Script. Then dumping out heading styles and remapping them manually. But this is going to take a century to do. And RTFs don’t retain images. Arggghhhhhh, I thought Mondays were bad!
Eugene, it’s true that clients often want the impossible. In this case, I can only suggest that you download a trial version of the product and see how it goes. It might help. But you’re still going to have to apply all those styles manually.
It’s ok, I just told them that’s near impossible what they want to achieve. I basically told them you can ask anyone and they will tell you the same, and then I told them that I’m not doing it. And that was that. They are now putting all the links up themselves to the PDF and that is the end of that.
I’m on the brink of purchasing this. Only trouble – the demo doesn’t work on my Mac 2.5 Dual PPC 2G Ram 10.4.10.
Awating a go from the client to recreate a number of ID docs from PDFs – guess I can gamble?
To be fair – the support team there converted a document for me. But I’d like to see it first hand to make a true evaluation.
Q: Its the most expensive item from Reconsoft – and all the upgrades seem to be 50% of original item – is the first upgrade (which is usually a bug fix) going to cost 50% again?
if there could be option as in illustrator, when saving as pdf – preserve illustrator editing capabilities :)
Just purchased this product and it won’t work on any of my MACS G5’s and Intel, CS2 and CS3 I get the same error message 4999 file won’t convert. I also purchased it for Windows and that works correctly on the same files that won’t convert on the MAC. I sent the file and the error message to Recosoft 3 days ago no word from them. Anyone else having this problem?
Recosoft has a fix for error 4999 it has not been released yet but they sent it to me and it resolved the problem apparently the error occurs on some Mac;s running 10.4.10 or higher the free upgrade to version 1.1 will include this fix
I would like to see the product demo for PDF2ID. Can you please provide me the details or send me the trail version. i would like to test before purchase. If you do not have an option. Please send me the video link. so that I can understand your product features and function. If you need any more information, Please let me know. Thanks – MK
You can find the demo versions of PDF2ID at the Recosoft Web site.
so i am having the smae problem as one of the daniel willsley above, and he was supplied with an answer that worked for him, i am sure t will for me, i just cant understand the answer. i have a pdf, i open it, then the file i get is in the correct format but all the letters are xxxx’s. so its a font problem (it tells me it doesnt recognise them) so the answer i think is to find some “dialouge box” and change the settings, great.. but where do i find the dialouge box?
Probably the Font Substitution dialog box… see the pop-up menu that is currently to “Processing Options” in the illustration in the blog post above? You can change that pop-up menu to font substitution. You’re not alone; it took me a while to find that, too.
In response to the posting by Phillip, you’re using a trial version of PDF2ID. That’s why all the text is appearing as “X/x”. The trial version dialog specifies this clearly. The trial version is not going to provide a full conversion. It’s only going to give you a “feel” for your output.
Has anyone ever used this software with foreign langauges (eg. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Russian or Greek).
I know the info from Recosoft claims to handle Asian lanuages, but it is alway nice to know someone has actually had it work for them.
Kim, while I haven’t tried foreign-language PDFs, I happen to know that the company is based in Japan and that the programmers work a lot with foreign language documents, so I’m pretty confident it should work… as long as you have the correct fonts mapped, of course.
Tried the plugin when it first came out. Didn’t work at all – kept getting a strange software error message. I reported the error. Was told to use the updated demo. That produced the same error and failed to convert the doc.
Reconsoft told me that the problem was fixed in the release version, but wouldn’t/couldn’t send me working demo or reset the demo – but they did convert my test pdf (woopie do!).
Don’t have any faith in this product. If I really get stuck then I’ll take a look again with V2. For me the support is poor and the product costly….and they’ve raised the cost again with V2 – well what can you say.
Rather than something I would purchase as an extra item for my toolkit – its now something that I’ll only purchase if I’m backed into a corner and desperately need it.
For version 1.1, to avoid error message 4999 you can try to disabled the firewall first.
For version 1.1, to avoid error message 4999 you can try to disabled the firewall first.
…..just a tad late.
Error crippled non functioning Demo expired months ago! So no way to tell if this works. And, as said, Reconsoft wouldn’t/couldn’t reset my demo – so pretty much impossible to test this product.
Also can’t run any networked computer with a firewall disabled – thats just mad
Maybe version 2 will allow the demo to run again – if not, then anyone who ran the v1 demo is going to be rather stuffed!
Hello,
I’d like to indicate that PDF2ID v2.0 is now shipping and a trial version has been posted on our website.
I’d also like to address the 4999 error issue mentioned above.
The 4999 error occurs due to a custom firewall that is set. The API calls that PDF2ID uses is completely legal and supported by the various Operating Systems (Mac OS X/Windows).
Being more specific, a certain port (port no. 5000 which is a legal user-space port) is being blocked out causing the 4999 error. PDF2ID v2.0 will now post a much more intelligent message (unlike the 4999 error) that a custom firewall has been set and it needs to be relaxed.
Basically, allowing port 5000 to operate normally (if you use a tool like little snitch it will tell you) will let PDF2ID function.
PDF2ID uses an advanced client-sever architecture. The conversion is performed by a back-ground process which the PDF2ID plug-in communicates with. If the PDF conversion ever crashes, InDesign is protected. Furthermore, this architecture offers significantly improved performance benefits on modern multi-core/processor systems due to Threading.
The benefits of protecting InDesign from crashing (if PDF2ID ever goes astray) and offering improved performance is far greater a benefit (we believe) then a minor inconvenience of allowing port no 5000 to operate.
Regards –
Paul Chadha
Director of Engineering & Chief Architect of PDF2ID
Recosoft Corporation
What settings do you enter in Little Snitch (on last day of demo v2)
ie APPLICATION –
do you select the plugin?
Nothing in the PDF2ID app folder?
SERVER –
Any server?
Local? Network?
PORT –
5000
PROTOCAL-
Any?
In response to Paul Taylor’s question.
When InDesign is running and you use the Open PDF file command, Little Snitch will get invoked. You can allow any/all connection (first radio button) or the default recommended one (last radio button). It should give you a port 5000 access warning.
I am so excited about PDFtoID. It will be really good that you launch this tool I will surely download this.
I’ve been using the trial version of this software on very simple .pdf files and it seems to work ok. I’ve tried on something more complex and it just hangs. I’ve let the program sit for about an hour to see if it will work through the issue, but no luck.
By complex I mean the original InDesign file had many overlaying objects before the file was exported to .pdf.
Anyone else having this problem?
Thanks.
In response to Jeff Romskog.
The only time this will occur is if the page that’s being converted contains many graphics objects (like 20000 or more).
PDF2ID has to collect the graphics data together and form something coherent out of it.
The above said the file will convert; it will just take some time.
We do have a patch that speeds things up to a certain degree but unfortunately its for our real users of PDF2ID and not for the trial version.
We’ve tried pages with 50000 or more graphics objects and it converts fine. The faster the system the faster the conversion speed. But the patch we have speeds it up more.
PDF2ID works :)
— paul chadha
— paul chadha
8/27/10 — Well, I see that the last entry was several months ago.
My specs: CS4 Master, Mac 10.4.11 Mac Pro 2×2.66 dual core 6GB ram, 275 GB available . . is that enough?
I’ve just had a very bizarre and unfavorable experience with the Recosoft PDF2ID trial version. It could be because I’m still on Mac OS 10.4.11 and CS4. Perhaps I don’t understand something about the way CS4 works, but the available Recosoft PDF2ID trial 8/18 seemed to introduce some kind of erratic behavior to my system and I lost a 10+MB, 44-page ID doc to a 3-MB PDF in the process.
My client has approved EXACTLY what I sent as the “final” document, a PDF created from within Acrobat “CONVERT” (from my PERFECT ID doc and now the original ID doc is no longer available). I only used this option because my standard ID “Export to PDF” option was messed up, in my opinion due to the trial PDF2ID plug-in from Recosoft.
My question may be more about Acrobat than either ID or the Recosoft PDF2ID plugin, but of course this happens on a weekend. Should I 1) just rebuild from scratch starting from my last backup and be wiser about 3rd party plugins, or 2) see if anyone out there has experienced something like this?
I can see that their newest version will be great etc, but for those of us who are waiting for paychecks to upgrade to OS6 and CS5, this is a real issue on a real weekend. Any ideas out there would be helpful.
avoid error message 4999 kindly “TURN OFF” all your firewall both private and public, it works CHARM and thanks for the info – VIJAY
I try this! Thanks!