Microsoft’s exit from desktop publishing puts decades of documents at risk. Free software offers a path forward.
Yesterday, MS Publisher users joined the millions of users who have been abandoned — or forced into a completely unjustified update — by Microsoft over the years, alongside those using Office LTSC 2021 and Office 2021. Consequently, anyone who has purchased a Microsoft 365 subscription will no longer be able to open their PUB files.
For millions of schools, parishes, associations, small businesses, and local authorities, this is a major problem. For over 30 years, they have been producing newsletters, leaflets, programs, posters, and calendars using Publisher. From today, these documents are in a proprietary format, the only fully compatible application for which has been abandoned by the very company that created it.
What Microsoft Suggests
Microsoft suggests converting PUB files to PDF format for viewing and printing, and to DOCX format for editing. In reality, neither of these represents a solution to the problem.
PDF preserves the layout but is not designed to be edited. DOCX can be edited, but Word is not a page-layout tool, so complex files lose their formatting during conversion.
In both cases, users are asked to transfer content from one format to another — with one of them being both vendor-controlled and proprietary. This is because documents are regarded as a by-product of the application, rather than as information belonging to those who created them.
For Microsoft, therefore, it is perfectly normal for access to content to disappear along with the application. This is a fact that should raise more than a few questions, but it seems to go unnoticed, to the extent that many Microsoft users claim this problem does not affect them.
The Free Software Community Solves the Problem
Publisher’s PUB format is not an open standard, so the developers working on the Document Liberation Project have reverse-engineered it and created the libmspub library, which is used by LibreOffice and Scribus to import Publisher files. This is to enable MS Publisher users to continue reading their own documents regardless of Microsoft’s decisions.
This means it is possible to open PUB files using free software and save them in the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the only standard, open format for office documents, which is not dependent on any single application or company. Alternatively, they can be opened with Scribus, which is open-source desktop publishing software, but does not use a standard document format.
LibreOffice Draw is the quickest way to open, view, edit and manage Publisher documents, and although it is not a desktop publishing application, it can be used for small multi-page documents, such as newsletters, or for single-page documents of any format.
A Lesson to Bear in Mind
MS Publisher is not the first Microsoft application to disappear from the market, and it certainly won’t be the last. Each time, users are faced with the same question: who controls access to my documents? If the format is proprietary, the answer is the vendor. If the format is standard and open, such as ODF, the answer is the user.
If you are responsible for documents in a public sector organization, a school, or an association, now is the time to check whether your file format is proprietary and dependent on a single vendor’s application, so that you can plan the transition to an open standard format whilst it is still possible to open them.
Guest writer Italo Vignoli is a co-founder at The Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice and the Document Liberation projects.
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