[Open PDF in InDesign] PDF2ID v3.5 – Customizing PDF to InDesign conversion

Greetings.

Welcome to the PDF2ID – Preferences tutorial.

As you’re all aware of PDF2ID’s phenomenal ability in converting PDF and Windows XPS to editable InDesign files, today we want to show how you can customize PDF2ID to better suit your workflow. Specifically, we want to go over the Preferences Panel of PDF2ID.

Over the last few years, a lot of users have been asking us whether there were ways customize PDF2ID so it would better fit their requirements; we’ve often directed everyone to the “Preferences Panel” as that’s where you get to customize PDF2ID. So, today we’re going to talk all about Preferences.

To get to the Preferences panel, we need to have the “PDF2ID – Options” window open. So, what we’re going to do is go to the Recosoft menu in InDesign and select the “Convert PDF/XPS file..” command. We choose any PDF file and click OK. Once the PDF2ID – Options window appears we see “Preferences” towards the right. Lets click it.

As you can see within the Preferences panel, there are a number of different areas that can be customized. What we’re seeing here are the “General” Preferences. By clicking the type menu you notice there also are Annotations, Color Profiles and Graphics, Default Font Mappings, Formatting Options and Other Preferences.

Lets go over General Preferences first as its already visible.

The area that says, “Converted file Options”; you notice that you can specify whether the converted “Images should be embedded in the InDesign file” or “linked” to the InDesign file. You also get to specify the “Destination folder” and whether to overwrite a file with the same name.

Moving down towards the “Default Style and Image Names” area you notice that you can specify the default Character style, Paragraph style and Image name and whether the Properties should also be added as part of the name. For example, in the case of Character Styles, a property would be the name and size of the font. PDF2ID will automatically append the font name and size if you want it to. For paragraphs the left/right indentation are properties. For images, the height and width are properties.

Towards the end we have the “Others” area. This allows you to control whether PDF2ID should display tips and whether PDF2ID should remember the last used conversion settings.

Lets now look at the Annotations Preferences.

The Annotation Preferences, allows you to specify the Font to use when Annotations are recovered. You also get to specify whether Annotations should be put into a separate layer in the resulting InDesign file, and whether annotations should be converted to InDesign notes; and finally whether to create a separate layer for each annotation author.

Now, lets switch to the Color Profiles and Graphics Preferences.

Within the Color Profiles and Graphics preferences, you notice you can make profile and graphics related setting. You get to specify the default RGB and CMYK color profiles when color space conversion occurs.

If you look at the Graphics Options, you notice you can control the resolution of images that are up-sampled. Furthermore, you can make PDF2ID provide more information of the image conversions by marking images that have been “Up-sampled”; marking “Fragmented images” that have been recombined to form a larger image; and marking images that were created from complex vector graphics.
Now, Lets look at the “Default Font Mappings” Preferences

The default font mappings are the fonts that PDF2ID automatically maps to when PDF fonts can’t be matched to fonts available in your system. You get to define a default font per language or actually encoding type.
Then we have “Formatting Options” Preferences.

The formatting Options allow you to fine-tune the conversion fidelity for Tables, Frames and Paragraphs.
Looking at Table and Cell properties, you can preset the Border type; Width alongwith the horizontal and vertical justification in a cell.
Within the frames linking area you can control whether frame breaks should be inserted or not. Within the Paragraph and Styles area you can specify the default paragraph justification and to what degree the style accuracy should be.

Finally, we have others Preferences.

Within the “others” panel you notice that you get to specify whether conversions should be recorded into a conversion log. The conversion log is beneficial if you ever want to see a complete list of files you converted using PDF2ID. The conversion log is an ordinary text file that lists the file name and conversion details.
Well, that’s it with PDF2ID Preferences. We know it has a lot of options and it can get be overwhelming. But we hope we were able to help you understand how robust and detailed the Preferences are; If you have any questions please visit us at www.recosoft.com.