[plug] Need help getting into publisher files.

[Bret Busby]

On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, Gavin Chester wrote:

> 
> 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.
>

What about installing Publisher on WINE? Does it run on WINE? If so, 
that could be useful for accessing the particular files, and for only 
accessing the existing .pub files.

I have no experience with WINE, but I believe that it is supposed to 
run most Windows applications (including most Microsoft applications for 
Windows), quite happily on it.

It could be worth considering, in the absence of other alternatives, if 
nothing else works well enough.

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
  you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
   Chapter 28 of
   "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
   A Trilogy In Four Parts",
   written by Douglas Adams,
   published by Pan Books, 1992

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