MS Publisher to Mac?

October 19, 2006 7:37 AM

Client sent me a bunch of MS Publisher files...I'm on a mac.

A client has sent me a bunch of MS Publisher files that I need to import into InDesign (and/or Quark). I'm not familiar with Publisher but know there is no mac client compatable - at least not that I've heard of. So, couple questions:

1. Would changing the codec on the publisher files work at all?
2. Is there a save option on MS Publisher that will allow me to open it here?
3. Is there software that could do some conversion to open it on a mac? I don't even care about flow, layout or anything; just want to get to the content.

Searched Mefi but didn't find anything about this. Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

posted by j.p. Hung to media & arts (9 comments total)

Unfortunately, Publisher is really restrictive. I've been successful printing to PDF in Publisher and editing the PDF in Illustrator. It was messy though.
I've also tried copying all out of Publisher and pasting into Word. Again, it is messy. Good luck.
posted by k8t at 7:44 AM on October 19, 2006

hmmm....yeah, the client made pdfs for me but it's a copy and paste nightmare. Nuts....
posted by j.p. Hung at 8:04 AM on October 19, 2006

Not even MacLinkPlus can read MS Publisher files on the Mac. The only route I know to convert the files to something readable, if you have the files and no access to Publisher, is to use Adobe's "Create PDF Online" service. It costs $10 per month, but you get five free documents from it to try it.

(If your documents are one file per page, as mine were, that can go pretty fast.)
posted by mdeatherage at 9:46 AM on October 19, 2006

Adobe have a converter that comes with PageMaker that supposedily convertes Publisher files into PageMaker. Since InDesign can read PageMaker files this may be an option depending on how well the Publisher filter works. This unfortunately is on a PC only but the Mac InDesign should open the PC PageMaker file.
posted by clarkie666 at 9:54 AM on October 19, 2006

bit link happy there....of course didn't mean to stick a empty link on Adobe...dammit.
posted by clarkie666 at 9:58 AM on October 19, 2006

Do you want only the text content? If so, you can save a .pub as a .txt and get all the text info.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 10:21 AM on October 19, 2006

But, you need Publisher to do that. I can convert them to .txt for you if that's all you need.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 10:23 AM on October 19, 2006

Thanks misan...

I didn't know Publisher could output as txt files. That could be a huge help. Thanks. I'm also looking into Pagemaker's capabilities. Thanks everyone for the help so far.
posted by j.p. Hung at 10:39 AM on October 19, 2006

When I ran into an issue with legacy Publisher stuff for use on a Mac, I had the person with the Publisher files just make screen dumps of the pages so I could kind of snip out the graphic elements they wanted to use, had them output to .txt (as suggested above) for the other goods, and e-mail the whole package to me. It wasn't an elegant solution, and required entirely recreating the layout, but well, it got the job done.
posted by taber at 4:51 PM on October 19, 2006