Specifications

PDF2DTP® for InDesign® Manual - 35
About PDF2DTP for InDesign (a few words from
the creator)
PDF (Portable Document Format) is an open standard for document exchange. This file format created by
Adobe Systems in 1993 is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software,
hardware, and operating systems. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat
document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it.
PDF2DTP for InDesign is an extremely valuable utility that converts a PDF to an editable application
document. If for example you discover you have lost your original document but only have a PDF you can
convert the PDF back into a document thus saving a lot of time it would otherwise take to re-create the
document from scratch by hand. However, a conversion may not reproduce the original document 100% and
there are several limitations of which you need to be aware of (See the full list later in this manual).
It helps to always think of a PDF as a “drawing” and that because the conversion process is quite complex the
software sometimes needs to make an “educated guess” where the end-result may not be a completely
satisfactory conversion. In other words you will no doubt need to make some manual changes to compensate.
By a “drawing” we mean a PDF contains specific information in order to render the fonts and images on the
computer screen, or to print the PDF. For example, a PDF can contain certain “glyphs” which are comprised
of drawing commands which enable the data to be drawn or printed, but the original TEXT characters may not
be defined within the PDF and so a conversion to an actual story may not even be possible.
A PDF often contains embedded fonts so that it can be displayed or printed on any platform. However, if the
fonts are missing (or not activated at the time) then the document created by the conversion will have
limitations or text flow problems.
A PDF also often contains images but the links to the original file path may not be known. The images may
also be down-sampled (lower resolution) and this poses a problem if you intend to create a document and wish
to use the original hi-res images.
Therefore, the actual goal isn’t necessarily to obtain a 100% conversion back to the original document. The
only real way to achieve a complete “full circle” is to embed the generated PDF with additional data that will
serve as “hints” to assist a conversion tool to be able to perform an accurate conversion. This could include
information for Styles Sheets, Guidelines and so forth, not to mention saving the image pathnames.
If you do run into some problems, please feel free to contact Markzware Technical s
upport so that we can
learn how to improve and provide the best conversion solutions for you.