Convert Publisher files to editable ODG

What stays editable

Every text box arrives as a Draw text frame: click into it, change a date or a price, and the text wraps inside the frame. Pictures are separate objects you can move, resize or replace; lines, rectangles and other simple shapes keep their fill and outline. Pages stay in the same order and at the same size, so after your edits Draw's PDF export gives you a fresh PDF.

The ODG keeps the original font names. On a computer that has the Microsoft fonts, for example a Windows PC with Office, Draw uses them and the page looks as it did in Publisher. On one that does not, Draw chooses its own substitutes, which may differ from the open fonts used for our PDF and image output.

What does not come across

Publisher's own machinery has no counterpart in Draw and is not converted: mail merge and catalog merge, business information sets, the design checker. What you get is the content of the pages: text, pictures and shapes in their places.

Text that flows through linked text boxes, such as a story continued across newsletter columns, needs the most care. Publisher works out where the text breaks between boxes each time it opens the file, and that result is not stored in it, so the converter does the same: it lays the story out box by box, in the order stored in the file and measured with the real fonts. Each box of the ODG holds the part that fits, and the rest continues in the next one. Two limits remain. Publisher can wrap text around a picture and LibreOffice cannot, so text that ran around a picture can end up behind it; in Draw you move the picture or the text box. And where a replaced font is wider than the original, the last box of a story can run out of room, and the text that does not fit is left out, as Publisher hides it. The report names those files: export them from Publisher if you still have it, or finish the ending in Draw.

Why not open the .pub in LibreOffice directly?

You can: LibreOffice reads .pub files with the same import library. The converter adds two things. It takes whole folders and ZIPs, so a hundred files do not have to be opened and saved one by one. And it decodes Publisher 97 and 98 files whose text was saved in Turkish, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic or Central European code pages, which LibreOffice as downloaded can turn into strings of wrong letters.

How to do it

1. 1Drop .pub files, a folder or a ZIP below. ODG is already selected.
2. 2Check page 1 of each file in the free preview.
3. 3Convert and download the ZIP.
4. 4Open each .odg in LibreOffice Draw, edit it, and export a PDF when you are done.

Known pitfalls

• Text behind a picture, or cut short in the last linked box: see above; the report names the files where a story does not fit.
• Layout shifts on another computer: the ODG uses whatever fonts the computer opening it has. Install the fonts the report names, or accept Draw's substitutes.
• Microsoft Office does not open .odg files. Send a PDF to anyone who does not use LibreOffice.
• There is no way back to .pub: no program other than Publisher writes that format.

Questions