Dear Adobe Programmers

Question

Has anyone a view on this matter?
I am not very hopeful after experiencing the incredible number of walls that need to be climbed to find anyone who could may be listen
Thanks anyway
Wihlem

Answer 1

narratorDE,
On behalf of Adobe ...
I am not a “programmer at Adobe InDesign” but I am having trouble decoding what the scenario you have provided to us.
(1) You state that you “had created a perfectly formated document in  Adobe®Acrobat-XI©® with all the very complex annotations, signatures an language settings that program allows me to put into a document.” However, Acrobat is not an authoring tool! Are you telling us that you created a PDF file using Acrobat from some other content such as Word, FrameMaker, QuarkXPress? Is this the case? If not, what did you do to create this document, presumably a PDF file, in Acrobat? Or did you save a PDF file as a Word file, for example?
(2) You then state that “the first command I gave after opening was «create new document» with four pages an one column per page and then «place» to open my nicely formated document.” Are you telling us that after creating a four page InDesign document, you then tried to place the PDF file from (1) above? If not, was it a Word file or some other format as I suggest in (1) above?
(3) Finally, you state that “without Warning… or any other indication that something could go wrong the machine put unformated text —literally somewhere— in the whole spread an it took me hours to force the text into the pre-defined columns.  Text frames jumped all over the place, but never where I wanted them to be located.” Since placed PDF does not reformat in any way whatsoever when placed into an InDesign document, I can only assume that what you really placed in your new InDesign document was in fact either a Word document or an RTF document.
I am going to assume that I am correct about this and you saved a PDF file as a Word (or RTF) file and then tried to place the Word (or RTF) file into a new InDesign document. If that is indeed the case, I think your expectations are bit too high. Why?
When Acrobat saves a file as a Word (or RTF) document, unless the PDF was created directly from Word using Acrobat's PDFMaker facility with all tagging enabled, Acrobat has to use heuristics to guess what is word, a sentence, a paragraph, a column, etc. PDF is a final form file format and unless it was created with the file was created with tagging, PDF simply contains graphic objects with absolutely no context as to how all those graphic objects relate to each other. The more complex the PDF file is – and apparently from your description, your PDF file was very complex including annotations and signatures – the more difficult it is to somehow craft a Word document or even a plain text file for output! In many cases, in a Word export, Acrobat simply has to punt and create a bunch of static text boxes in order to preserve the visual appearance of the original PDF.
This is further complicated by the act of placing a Word document in InDesign. Word and InDesign have vastly different metaphors for document structure as well as algorithms for justification and spacing. InDesign's placement of Word documents attempts to retain the fidelity of the original document as best as possible within the constraints of the differences in the document structure metaphor. Assuming you have a “perfect” Word document religiously using styles, then still will be some need for manual adjustments after you place that document. There is no real way to avoid that. But what makes this more difficult in your case is that you would be placing a really hacked-up Word document for which the structure is likely anything but ideal because of the lack of context from which it was created.
If you saved the PDF file as a simple text file in Acrobat, you obviously will have a tremendous amount of work to “fixup” the contents placed into InDesign. Why? Because the text saved from Acrobat doesn't differentiate between end of line or end of paragraph. Extra CR/LF are inserted between what looks like paragraphs.
If for the PDF file you had in Acrobat you had the original document, whether Word or text, you likely would have been more successful placing that directly into InDesign.
          - Dov