PUB → PDF is how you open a newsletter or flyer when nobody in the office still has Publisher: page size, pictures and selectable text come through, while flowing multi-column stories are the weak spot.
From real runs
| Element | Result | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Page size and page count | Kept | The Contoso brochure stayed two A4 landscape pages (841.89 × 595.28 pt) and the August senior-centre newsletter stayed seven Letter pages, so a print shop gets the sheet size the file was designed for. |
| Text | Kept | Headlines, addresses and body copy land in the PDF as real text, so you can search the bulletin or copy a phone number out of it. |
| Pictures and clip-art | Kept | The brochure PDF carried 5 image objects and the newsletter 11, at their placed sizes and positions. |
| Fonts | Changed | Tahoma, Franklin Gothic and Garamond are not on our servers, so Noto Sans, Noto Serif or Liberation stand in. Script fonts used for church and certificate titles fall back to a plain face and can wrap one line earlier. |
| Text wrap around pictures | Lost | Publisher's wrap settings are not applied, so clip-art that body text flowed around ends up sitting on top of the words, as on page 3 of the newsletter. |
| Stories that flow between linked frames | Changed | In a four-page newsletter built from a Publisher template, an article that continued across three columns was repeated in each column and ran down over the next story. Single-frame text was fine. |
| WordArt | Lost | A birthday-club poster made of WordArt converted to nothing but ruled lines; when a page comes out with no text and no pictures we stop and say so instead of handing back a blank PDF. |
| Publisher 2000 and earlier | Lost | Files saved by Publisher 98 or 2000 came out as text only with a blank first page, so they are refused before conversion with a message to re-save them. |
The Contoso brochure stayed two A4 landscape pages (841.89 × 595.28 pt) and the August senior-centre newsletter stayed seven Letter pages, so a print shop gets the sheet size the file was designed for.
Headlines, addresses and body copy land in the PDF as real text, so you can search the bulletin or copy a phone number out of it.
The brochure PDF carried 5 image objects and the newsletter 11, at their placed sizes and positions.
Tahoma, Franklin Gothic and Garamond are not on our servers, so Noto Sans, Noto Serif or Liberation stand in. Script fonts used for church and certificate titles fall back to a plain face and can wrap one line earlier.
Publisher's wrap settings are not applied, so clip-art that body text flowed around ends up sitting on top of the words, as on page 3 of the newsletter.
In a four-page newsletter built from a Publisher template, an article that continued across three columns was repeated in each column and ran down over the next story. Single-frame text was fine.
A birthday-club poster made of WordArt converted to nothing but ruled lines; when a page comes out with no text and no pictures we stop and say so instead of handing back a blank PDF.
Files saved by Publisher 98 or 2000 came out as text only with a blank first page, so they are refused before conversion with a message to re-save them.
We converted our Microsoft Publisher sample (158 KB) with Office engine on 2026-10-20. It took 1.3 s and produced a 154 KB PDF file, about the same size as the input. The engine raised 2 warnings, listed below.
Input · sample.pub · 158 KB
OLE2 compound document (legacy Office binary)
Output · sample.pdf · 154 KB
PDF 1.6, 2 pages, selectable text (NotoSerif-Regular, NotoSerif-Bold, LiberationSans, LiberationSansNarrow), 5 image objects
LibreOffice
soffice --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir out newsletter.pubLibreOffice opens .pub files in Draw. Install the fonts the publication uses first, and expect the same multi-column and WordArt problems described above.
Microsoft Publisher
File → Export → Create PDF/XPS Document → PublishThe only exact route. If one person in the organisation still has Publisher, a batch of exports from it beats any converter for template newsletters.
The HTTP API and the MCP server run the exact engine this page uses (Office engine); the response carries the same warnings the web converter shows. Check support first with GET /api/v1/pairs?from=pub&to=pdf.
curl -X POST https://filetypeconverters.com/api/v1/convert \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $FTC_API_KEY" \
-F "file=@input.pub" -F "from=pub" -F "to=pdf" \
--output output.pdfNot in Word, Google Docs or Canva; none of them read the format. Converting to PDF gives you something every computer and phone opens, and that is what this page does.
Publisher lets one story flow from column to column through linked text frames, and lets text wrap around pictures. Our office engine places each frame where it was drawn but does not reflow the story or apply the wrap, so busy template pages can end up with text running into the next article or under a picture.
Microsoft ended support for Publisher in October 2026 and no longer includes it in Microsoft 365, and no other mainstream app reads .pub files. Converting the archive to PDF keeps every newsletter readable; keep the .pub originals too in case someone with an old copy of Publisher needs to edit one.
We do not offer it. Publisher pages are loose frames on a canvas, and in our tests a Word export became hundreds of floating text boxes, one per line, with no paragraphs to edit. A PDF of the page plus retyping in Word is faster.