Publisher files, without Publisher
Newsletters, flyers, certificates, church bulletins, menus, cards: many offices, schools and
clubs have years of them as Microsoft Publisher .pub files, and only Publisher opens them.
Microsoft 365 subscribers can't use Publisher after 1 October 2026, and support for the last
versions sold on their own (Publisher 2021 and LTSC) ends on 13 October 2026. This converter
reads .pub files without Publisher and turns them into files that open anywhere.
Upload one publication, several, or a ZIP of your folders: the result comes back as one ZIP with the same folders and file names, so an archive of hundreds of publications stays in order.
| Convert to | You get |
|---|---|
| One PDF per publication with every page at its real size. Optionally PDF/A-2b for archives. | |
| JPG or PNG | A picture of every page at 96, 150, 300 or 600 dpi, for printers, websites and social media. |
| ODG | An editable drawing for LibreOffice Draw (open-source): text boxes, shapes and pictures you can change and save again. |
| SVG | Every page as a vector drawing for Inkscape, Affinity or a website (text as outlines). |
| Everything | PDF, ODG and PNG pages together, plus the pictures inside. |
With Also extract the pictures inside you also get the photos and clip art stored in each file, exactly as they were put in (JPEG, PNG, GIF, or WMF and EMF clip art), named by the page they are on.
The report: what to check
Converting a publication without Publisher is not always pixel-perfect, and it is better to know
where than to find out later. Every job comes with a report, shown on the page and offered as
report.html; with several files it also comes as a spreadsheet (report.csv), and both are in
the ZIP. For each file it lists:
- the Publisher version that made it, the number of pages and the page size,
- a small picture of its first page,
- every font the publication uses and what it is shown with. Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Calibri and Cambria are replaced by open-source fonts with the same letter widths, so lines break exactly where they did. Other fonts get a replacement with other widths, and text can wrap differently; those files are marked Converted, please check. Fonts stored inside the file are used as they are,
- embedded objects such as WordArt, and whether they made it onto the pages,
- empty pages, and files that could not be converted, with the reason.
Files marked Converted have nothing known to look different. Check the ones marked for a look while you still have a way to open the originals.
Supported versions
Files from Publisher 95, 97, 98, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 have been tested, and Publisher 2002 and later versions up to Microsoft 365 write the same kind of file. Files from Publisher 95 and 97 are converted with their text, shapes and pictures, but their fonts and text colours can't be read (the text comes out in one standard font, in black) and their WordArt is often missing; the report says so for each file. The very first versions, Publisher 1.0 and 2.0 from the early 1990s, can't be read at all.
Other files that end in .pub are recognised and explained, most often SSH public keys
(id_rsa.pub, id_ed25519.pub), which have nothing to do with Publisher.
Editing afterwards
The ODG version opens in LibreOffice Draw, where every text box can be edited. To work on a publication in Word, open the PDF in Word (File > Open): Word turns it into an editable document. Canva, Affinity and Inkscape import the PDF as well.
How it works
The files are converted on our server with LibreOffice and its open-source Publisher import, libmspub from the Document Liberation Project. Each job runs in its own locked-down workspace, and macros are switched off.
Privacy
Uploads are deleted as soon as the job finishes, and the results after 30 minutes (or at once with Delete now). Nothing is kept, shared or used for anything else.