[plug] Need help getting into publisher files.

[Gavin Chester]

On Mon, 2005-07-04 at 09:08 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Jul 2005, Meryon Montgomery wrote:
> 
> > Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 16:27:32 +0800
> > From: Meryon Montgomery <monts at westnet.com.au>
> > Reply-To: plug at plug.org.au
> > To: plug at plug.org.au
> > Subject: [plug] Need help getting into publisher files.
> > 
> > I've recently helped a friend switch from windoze. They are able to get 
> > around the system and use various tools like OO.org and Scribus to create 
> > documents.
> >
> > The problem is this; they have several publisher documents that they need to 
> > get into, I've googled and found that there is no one easy solution to this 
> > problem ( has to do with the horrible file format that publisher uses).
> >
> > Has anyone found a way to get .pub files imported into scribus or OO.org. I'm 
> > thinking about a print to ps or eps and seeing if I can import that?
> >
> > Any Solutions or hints would be great
> > _______________________________________________
> >
> 
> Depending on the version of Publisher, from memory, later versions can 
> export to HTML.
> 
> If that is correct, perhaps, exporting to HTML, then editing the created 
> HTMl files with whatever application the user chooses, could be a 
> solution.
> 

I only have access to Pub2000 on my Windoze98 PC and find that:
You can save the page as html (badly composed, non-W3C compliant), plain
txt, rtf, many formats of doc, ps, and plus a few other proprietary
formats.  However, you have to have access to a box running publisher
and most formats will only extract the text (obviously) leaving you with
having to rebuild the brochure almost from scratch with access to the
original graphics used - as separate files.

Whatever method you use you will have to rebuild the publisher work in
some fashion in scribus.  No escaping that.  You won't always get good
results with importing ps files, but sometimes you can import pdf files
- with some loss of design elements and/or text.  So that means you
often won't get good imports of well composed pages.  YMMV. 

No easy way out of this, AFAIK. Maybe sell them on the idea that the
work will be in a non-proprietary format and redundant-proof once they
have converted to scribus or similar :-)  

Gavin.