Coverting Indesign 2.0 documents to Microsoft Word xp documents

[Pam_Sepesi@adobeforums.com]

How would you go about converting indesign documents to microsoft word documents?
Is there a way to convert them?
Thanks for any help that you can give......
--Pam

[Scott_McCullough@adobeforums.com]

Pam:

InDesign and Word are such radically different programs that there's really no way to replicate an ID file in Word, much less perform a one-click conversion. You can extract the text out of ID and save it in Word format, but Word simply wasn't designed to allow the kind of design flexibility InDesign offers. It's a word-processing program that allows some limited design capabilities, while InDesign is a high-end page layout program that allows the sophisticated arrangement and manipulation of text and graphics.

If you're just wanting to allow people without InDesign to view the files, the best strategy is to convert them to PDF files. Those will retain the exact appearance of the InDesign files, plus they'll be much smaller files than could be achieved with Word. Your users would be able to use Acrobat's search function and copy text out of the files for use in other documents. They could also easily print the files on their office printers with the exact appearance of the original InDesign files.

Hope this helps!

Scott

[Olav_Kvern@adobeforums.com]

Pam--

You can also export the text as RTF and open the exported files using Word. This won't preserve the layout, but it will get you the text formatting.

Thanks,

Ole

[Ian_Jacobs@adobeforums.com]

I have found the best way to do this is to make a PDF of your Indesign file then convert it using ABBYY FineReader. I recently had a 300 page book which converted perfectly.
I have no connection with this company but find their OCR software is the best I have ever seen.
Ian