ReflowPDFCommunity
QuestionAnswered

How good is the AI conversion on a foreign InDesign PDF? A couple things came in wrong

2 replies · 836 views

Hannah W.
6 rep

Client sent me a 12-page brochure that was clearly built in InDesign and exported flat. I imported it, let the AI conversion run, and most of it came back surprisingly clean and editable. Two things tripped it though: a narrow sidebar that was set in two columns got merged into one long block, and one of the data tables lost its inner borders (the outer frame survived).

Before I burn more AI pages experimenting, what tends to confuse the conversion the most? Is there anything I can do on the source side to get a cleaner first pass?

2 Answers

Carlos M.Pro
9 rep
Accepted

The conversion is a best-effort reconstruction of the layout, so the more structurally complex a region is, the more it can wobble. Multi-column sidebars and nested/borderless tables are the two classic ones, which lines up exactly with what you saw. Heavy overlapping or text-on-image areas can also flatten.

Two things that help: make sure the source actually has a real text layer (select some text in a normal viewer first, if you can't, it's basically a scan and the conversion has way less to work with). And don't sweat the small stuff on the AI pass, fix the sidebar split and re-add the table borders by hand after import, then export. Once it's a ReflowPDF export, every future edit round-trips for free, so you only pay for that one conversion.

Hannah W.
6 rep
OP

perfect, that sorted it. appreciate the help