Pubsmith

Pubsmith opens Microsoft Publisher .pub files without Publisher, for people left with files they can no longer open after Publisher's retirement (October 2026). It reads the file natively (no Publisher, no LibreOffice), turns it into an open JSON document format, and renders it to PNG and vector PDF.

Rescue a publication

pubsmith render brochure.pub --pdf brochure.pdf

pubsmith import brochure.pub --out brochure-rescued

render converts straight to PDF and/or PNG (--png page.png --dpi 300; a multi-page publication gives page-p1.png, page-p2.png, ...). import writes the editable document (brochure.json), its pictures, and brochure.import.json, which lists everything drawn approximately, shown as a placeholder outline, or left out. Nothing is dropped silently: what Pubsmith can't reproduce yet is outlined on the page and named in the report, and a damaged file is reported as such instead of crashing the tool.

Until there are releases, build it yourself (below) and run dotnet src/Pubsmith.Cli/bin/Release/net10.0/pubsmith.dll in place of pubsmith.

Status: early. The native reader decodes page structure, geometry, fills and lines, pictures, WordArt and text of Publisher 2003–2021 files. On 142 single-feature files built by Publisher itself, every editable shape and text box matches Publisher's own layout export (frame within 0.1 pt, rotation, fill and text); in 41 of them Publisher's export turns every element into a picture, so for those only page count and size are compared. Whole real pages are still being brought up to Publisher's look: on the maintainers' own 106-page corpus, 18 % of pages are within the target score (docs/plan/WI-004-native-pub-reader-spike.md). Tables, freeform shapes, gradients, picture adjustments and linked text boxes are not reproduced yet. Files from Publisher versions before 2003 are not supported. There's no editor UI yet.

Project	What
src/Pubsmith.PubReader	Native .pub reader: compound file, OfficeArt shapes, Publisher's Contents and Quill (text) streams, and the importer that maps them onto the document model
src/Pubsmith.Core	Document model (pages, shapes, images, text), JSON format with schema versioning
src/Pubsmith.Rendering	SkiaSharp renderer. One drawing path for PNG and PDF. Also font resolution with substitution warnings, and the image comparer used for fidelity tests. A RenderContext reads each picture once, keeps decoded copies within a budget, and owns them; it keeps what it first found for each picture file (only a file it could not read is tried again), so use one per command, on one thread, and dispose it
src/Pubsmith.Cli	The pubsmith command: render (a .pub or a document JSON to PDF/PNG) and import (a .pub to a document JSON)
tests/	xUnit tests. tests/fixtures/pub holds the Publisher-built feature files with Publisher's own layout export and renders of them, which are the expected results
tools/oracle	Publisher automation: the harvest export, the feature and diff corpus builders, the layout export, and the PubOracle VM inbox scripts
docs/plan	Work-item plans (acceptance criteria → tests → results)
docs/format/pub-format-notes.md	What we know about the .pub format, in our own words
docs/publisher-oracle-vm.md	Setting up the Publisher 2021 test VM

Build and test

Requires the .NET 10 SDK.

dotnet build -c Release

dotnet test

Coverage (house floor: 85 % line coverage per touched file):

dotnet test --collect:"XPlat Code Coverage"

Platforms. Developed and tested on Windows. SkiaSharp ships native libraries for Windows and macOS; Linux needs the SkiaSharp.NativeAssets.Linux package, which is not referenced yet. The rendering tests assume Windows fonts (Arial, Arial Black, Calibri, Segoe UI, Times New Roman, Courier New).

Tools. The scripts in tools/oracle need PowerShell 7 and a working Publisher (a desktop install that still runs, or the PubOracle VM). The fidelity scoring scripts also need ImageMagick (magick), and matte.py needs Python 3 with numpy and Pillow.

Reference material and the corpus suite

Everything the always-on tests need is in tests/fixtures/: Publisher-built single-feature .pub files, Publisher's own layout export and 300 dpi renders of them, and neutral test art. The opt-in corpus suite measures real-world fidelity on real .pub files: harvest them with tools/oracle/Export-PubHarvest.ps1 and tools/oracle/Invoke-PubLayoutBatch.ps1 (both need a working Publisher; the layout exports go to the harvest's funcular\ folder), then set PUBSMITH_CORPUS to that folder. Real files are never committed. The suite is calibrated to the maintainers' own 36-file corpus (its file count and known text mismatches), so on another corpus read its report rather than its pass/fail; it writes native\ and native-report.csv into that folder.

Not affiliated with Microsoft

Pubsmith is an independent project. Microsoft and Publisher are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. The file-format knowledge comes from Microsoft's published OfficeArt specification (MS-ODRAW), from our own differential tests, and from notes written in our own words after studying libmspub (MPL-2.0); see docs/format/pub-format-notes.md.

License

MIT; see LICENSE. Third-party components and their licences are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.