PDF and Word to InDesign, with text you can actually work with

Who this is for

The usual case: a client sends a brochure, a leaflet or a report as a PDF, the source files are gone, and the translation has to come back laid out like the original. Someone then spends hours rebuilding pages in InDesign before a single word is translated, and that time is hard to bill.

This is built for the people who do that work: translation agencies with a DTP desk, freelance layout specialists, and in-house teams who publish in several languages. If you only need to read a PDF in another language, you do not need any of this. A translated Word file is simpler, and we make that too.

The ways to get a PDF into InDesign, compared

Judge it on your own file, not on this table. Pick the worst page you have this month and upload it.

What is in the file

• Text: one story threaded through each page's frames, not a loose frame for every block. Unequal Word columns become one threaded frame each, because InDesign has no unequal frame columns.
• Styles: paragraph and character styles named after the Word style or the look, not hundreds of throwaway ones. Runs that look alike are merged, so the Story Editor reads clean.
• Tables: InDesign tables with merged cells, shading and turned text. A long one goes on across pages with its header rows repeated, and rows are at least as tall as Word sets them.
• Notes: footnotes as InDesign footnotes with their own numbering. Endnotes are set after the last paragraph, as Word prints them.
• Graphics: pictures placed and scaled to fit, shapes and groups drawn as InDesign shapes, charts and WMF or EMF pictures placed as PDFs.
• Masters: running heads and page numbers on masters, shared by the pages whose heads read alike.
• Languages: text is tagged with its language where InDesign lists one, and each script takes the composer InDesign's own files use: World-Ready for Hebrew, Arabic, Indian scripts, Thai and Korean, CJK for Chinese and Japanese.
• Pages: a PDF or a scan keeps its pages, one InDesign page for each printed page. A translation that runs longer gets more pages at the end, so the text has somewhere to go.

How a job runs

1. Upload the document. A PDF with a text layer is set from that layer, with no AI reading it. A scan is read by a model and rebuilt.
2. Check the Word copy if you like. It is the same content the InDesign file will hold, and it is the easiest place to fix a misread number.
3. Order a translation if you need one, or just take the copy. You can also translate the IDML in your own CAT tool.
4. Open the download menu and choose the InDesign file for the original or the translation.
5. We show which fonts the file uses and where to get them. Install the ones you lack.
6. Open the file in InDesign, save it as INDD, and finish the page as you normally would.

Fonts are yours to install

The download holds no fonts. Microsoft's licences do not let us hand out Arial or Calibri, so we tell you what you need instead. After the download you see each font the file uses: whether it comes with Windows, macOS or Office, or a link to the official page where a free font is published. A font in the PDF that nobody can get publicly is marked as one to ask the document's author for.

Where a PDF prints in a font you may not own, the Word copy and the IDML use the closest stand-in by printed width, so lines break about where they did. You can swap it for the real font with Type > Find Font.

Where a font lacks a letter, InDesign shows an empty box instead of borrowing a glyph as Word does. In our test set that was 39 of 68 multilingual files and about 169,000 characters. So we set each such letter in an open font that has it and name that font in the same list.

What we check, and how

How alike the versions set one file

We compared all 39,231 lines of those files as each version set them in its PDF, against InDesign 2026 on Windows. The table gives the share of lines standing more than a few points away.

So 2024, 2025 and a Mac set lines where 2026 on Windows does, in every script but 0.1% of right-to-left lines on a Mac. The version matters mainly on 2021 and 2022, which still move right-to-left and Indian text: go through those pages again if a file moves to or from one of them. The 2022 row leaves out the 15 files in the fonts that version will not use.

Before you send it to print

The file is a working layout, not a press-ready one. Plan for these, as you would with any converted file.

• Colours come through as RGB swatches. Convert them if the job is CMYK.
• Pictures from a PDF are cut from the page at 200 dpi, and those from a scan are as sharp as the scan. Relink the originals when you have them. Pictures in a Word file stay as they are in that file.
• No bleed or slug is set.
• Fonts standing in by width should be swapped for the real ones if you hold the licence.

What we are still improving

• Rare scripts. A document with a character none of the fonts we can name holds, such as Traditional Mongolian, is refused with the reason on screen. The Word files still download.
• Very full pages. InDesign sets some text a little longer than Word does, so a full page can push text on. Before hand-off open the Preflight panel, and if it lists overset, extend the frame or thread another.
• Very crowded pages. A page too crowded to stay on its sheet becomes one picture with its text in frames on top. The words stay editable, but that page's text no longer flows and its table is no longer a table.
• Handwriting. A scanned page is read by a model, and handwriting needs a person's eye.
• Unusual text layers. A PDF whose layer holds no real letters is treated as a scan. An old custom-encoded font, such as Preeti for Nepali, holds Latin letters drawn as another script, and we cannot recover that text yet.

Your files

Files are stored in the EU and deleted 30 days after upload by default. Text that goes to an AI model passes through OpenRouter (US) with training off, and the rule-based checks never leave our servers. The subprocessors page lists who is involved. The IDML is made on request from the stored Word file.