The pain of Microsoft Publisher

So, it's happened several times in the past few years. Printers and friends have called asking for help dealing with a Microsoft Publisher file. Any time I hear those two words, I cringe. And the dead player music from Atari's Pitfall plays somewhere in the background.

A friend and colleague called today asking for help with a Publisher file. His wife is doing some consulting work for a firm that's creating Publisher files for posters, flyers, newsletters... And they're all unavailable, leaving her to finish up the work.

He asked what to do, since these are PC Publisher files, and he has a Mac, and he can't open them with Word or Pages or anything else. He hoped I would have a magic suggestion that involved some professional design app he could use on a 30-day trial or something. I wish I did.

Publisher has been the source of at least three or four calls to me in the past couple years. These are printers calling for help dealing with these files. And I believe that I know and work with some of the finest and high-volume printers in New York, so my sample is pretty good. And these guys don't want to touch these Publisher files at all.

Their first question is usually, "can you open this and turn it into something else?" No.

Second, "Can you export it as a PDF?" Again, unfortunately, no.

I ask, "Can you have the people that made it turn it into a PDF?"

They answer, "We did, and the fonts are all screwy, it'll never print." Ah, if it's not one thing, it's another. Thank you Microsoft.

What happens here is that even if the creator of the Publisher file can output it as a PDF, they often can't find a way to embed the fonts in the file. Or they don't have the technical proficiency to execute a print production workflow, and the font-embedding discussion is lost on them.

Now, I'm not one to judge, but professional designers don't use Publisher, and it should never be used for anything that will be printed by something other than one's desktop inkjet printer. I think that the way to make a well-formatted PDF from Publisher would be to export/print the file to a Postscript file, then run that through Acrobat Distiller, having set it to embed all fonts.

This might work, but of course, requires a full version of Acrobat, or Acrobat Professional or whatever they're calling it these days. Short of that, I think Publisher files are a dead-end in the print-production world.

But, of course, I'm not one to judge.