Move Publisher files to InDesign or Affinity

The short version

• Affinity: open the PDF. Affinity turns it into an editable document with text, pictures and shapes as separate objects.
• InDesign: place the Word file to get the text with its styles, and place the PDF as a guide or as a finished page.

Affinity: open the PDF as an editable layout

Affinity, Canva's desktop design app and the successor of Affinity Publisher, can open PDF files for editing. That makes the PDF from PubRescue the quickest way to get a Publisher layout into it.

1. Convert your .pub files above and download the PDFs.
2. In Affinity, choose File > Open and pick the PDF.
3. Each page arrives with its text frames, pictures and shapes in place. Click a text frame to edit the words.
4. Save it as an Affinity document and carry on from there.

Fonts that came with Microsoft Office are replaced by metric-compatible fonts in the PDF. If you have the originals installed, such as Calibri or Cambria, select the text and switch it back. Text in a PDF is stored line by line, so long stories may come in as several frames; for long text, the Word route below gives you cleaner stories.

InDesign: place the text and the layout

InDesign can't edit a PDF the way Affinity can, but it has excellent Word import. A good workflow for rebuilding a Publisher document:

1. Download the PDF and the Word file for each .pub file.
2. Set up the document in InDesign with the same page size. The PDF shows it: open it in any PDF reader and check the document properties.
3. Place the PDF on a locked layer as a template to trace the layout, or, for a page that doesn't need changes, place it as the finished page. Use File > Place with Show Import Options to pick the page.
4. Place the Word file to bring in the text. Use File > Place, choose the .docx and flow it into your frames. Bold, italics, font sizes and paragraphs come along, and you can map the Word styles to your InDesign styles.
5. Relink the pictures. In Word, pictures are separate objects you can save out. Or take them from your original image files if you still have them.

Scribus, Canva and other tools

The same files work elsewhere. Scribus can import PDF pages and Word text. Canva can open PDFs for editing; see Publisher to Canva. If you're still choosing a tool, our Publisher alternatives page compares them.

Moving a whole library

Design studios, schools and print shops often have hundreds of .pub files to migrate. Upload a folder or a ZIP and download one ZIP with a PDF and a Word file next to every original, in the same folder structure. You don't have to rebuild everything at once: keep the PDFs as the archive and open them in InDesign or Affinity as each design comes up for reuse. See bulk conversion.

What to expect

• Page size and positions match the original Publisher file.
• Fonts are embedded in the PDF as metric-compatible replacements for Office fonts, so line breaks match.
• Very old files from Publisher 98 or 2000 convert with lower accuracy. See old Publisher files.
• Previews are free for every file, so you can check before paying.

Privacy

Your files are used only to make your downloads. Free uploads are deleted automatically 24 hours after upload and paid ones after 7 days. See the privacy policy.