[bbales]

I said I would help with a newsletter for next school year. I have just found out the printer ONLY uses Publisher. NOw, granted, we do have a Windows machine that I think has publisher on it, but are there are Publisher-friendly Mac applications out there? I've tried Pages and inDesign and they won't open the document the former editor sent me.

Thanks.

[-Q-]

Short answer, no. There isn't anything that can open publisher files on the mac currently

Long answer, you have three options:

1)If it's just for archival purposes, have your former editor convert the docs to another format as outlined in this support doc. If you need 'em for printing, have him/her convert them to PDF files.

2) If your former editor has access to Pagemaker 7, the windows version came with a utility that would convert publisher docs to PM docs. You could then open those docs in InDesign (but I have no idea what that will do to the layout).

3. Change printers b/c any printer who uses Publisher as their only file format isn't worth a damn.

[larkost]

I am going to completely agree with point 3. Any publisher who does not suggest PDF as the first option should be avoided.

[bbales]

I was mistaken -- the printer uses publisher, but only because people who bring them things still use it! The printer does not prefer it at all. So I have some options available to me -- unfortunately, as the person who has been doing this before usedd publisher, that's how it's all laid out. I'm going to play around with it to see what I can do to change things around.

thanks for the help.

[Superchicken]

Can't believe people even use that App, they were using it at church today to set up something... and I just wanted to cry after using it for a bit I ran for my PowerBook later... if I get a job interning... I might have to try and connect my PowerBook to the network... and see if we can't get it working with the big ol printer.

[Millennium]

It doesn't look like there are any good solutions for viewing Publisher files. Even Windows doesn't have any viewers.

I hate to say it, but your best bet may be to export to PDF or EPS or even HTML (assuming you have a recent version of Publisher), scrape as much of the content out as you can, and redo the layout in another program. This will be a pain, but I don't know if there are really any other options.

[Millennium]

Actually, now that I look at it again, Publisher can export to some kind of XML format. It's completely undocumented, as far as I can tell, but it might be possible to reverse-engineer that format and convert it to something more useful. It should be easier than trying to reverse-engineer any of the other formats, anyway.

This would require a fair amount of coding work, and so if you only need to do this for one document it's probably easier to just scrape the content out and redo it in another program. However, such a converter might be useful to others.

[JMII]

Can this help? http://simpleprep.com
You could convert the Publisher doc into a PDF and edit that (with some limitations) in Illustrator.