View Issue Details

IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0017760ScribusImport / Exportpublic2026-02-28 17:10
Reporteriantarrant Assigned Tocbradney  
PrioritynormalSeveritymajorReproducibilityalways
Status resolvedResolutionfixed 
PlatformPCOSWindowsOS Version10
Product Version1.7.2 
Fixed in Version1.6.6.svn 
Summary0017760: MS Publisher import needs more development: Image scaling
DescriptionSomebody has done much of the basic work to enable the import of MS Publisher files.
However two key features seem to be missing.
Linked text boxes are imported, but without links, so that the imported text begins afresh in each of the boxes.
Graphics which have been resized in Publisher come into Scribus cropped instead.
Steps To ReproduceI am attaching a small test file in Publisher which demonstrates these problems.
Also a pdf of what that file looked like in Publisher.
Additional InformationMS Publisher will soon be unsupported, so many people are looking for an alternative which is able to import their stock of old .pub files.
If these issues were fixed, Scribus would pick up a huge number of new users.
Tagsimport, import publisher, mspub
Attached Files
test1.pub (173,056 bytes)
test1.pdf (535,669 bytes)
PatchNo

Relationships

related to 0017765 new MS Publisher import needs more development: Linked text boxes are imported, but without links, so that the imported text begins 

Activities

ale

2026-02-21 19:00

manager   ~0053515

Thank you for sharing the files.

Without having such "simple" samples, it's hard to spot what does not work.

Still somebody needs to dig into it...
We will see if somebody will take the time for it...

Lynn

2026-02-22 15:33

reporter   ~0053520

I was curious and looked it up; apparently Microsoft still has never published a specification for .pub files, hence why nobody has a full-featured import for it.

The Libreoffice Draw importer is the only other open-source implementation I could find. I tested both programs on the sample file - libreoffice does a better job on resizing the picture and captures the bold and italic text. But both of them have the same behavior for the text boxes (the full text of the text chain is included in each box - if you expand the text boxes in Scribus you'll see that it's simply been resized to hide the rest of the text chain.) However publisher is coding these linked text frames clearly hasn't been decoded.

It would probably take a pretty heroic swing for someone to untangle all the details of how publisher is encoding these files if Microsoft continues to not release the specs.

cbradney

2026-02-22 16:21

administrator   ~0053521

Last edited: 2026-02-22 16:45

LibreOffice and Scribus both use librevenge and libmspub to import the files. The libraries do not support frame linking unfortunately. LO actually imports the file with three text frames, each of which contain all the text.

cbradney

2026-02-22 21:27

administrator   ~0053522

r27428 has a change to support reading the stretch option from the mspub file so the image import should be ok now. We cannot fix the text frame linking option without receiving the data properly from the libraries rely on though.

cbradney

2026-02-28 14:29

administrator   ~0053550

Backported to 1.6.6..svn

iantarrant

2026-02-28 17:10

reporter   ~0053551

Thank you for looking at this.
And for sorting the graphics glitch.
I understand that the library function does not return the information that the frames are linked, and puts the whole text into each scribus frame. Would it be possible at this point for the import software to compare frames and notice that the text in those frames is identical, and conclude that they should be linked, in order of appearance? Obviously one would not compare any frames where the text is trivially short, or shorter than its frame can display.
Occasionally a document might have text linked across frames which are in a different order from the conventional sequence, but with such exotic documents it would be for the user to re-link frames as required.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2026-02-21 16:53 iantarrant New Issue
2026-02-21 16:53 iantarrant Tag Attached: import
2026-02-21 16:53 iantarrant Tag Attached: import publisher
2026-02-21 16:53 iantarrant Tag Attached: mspub
2026-02-21 16:53 iantarrant File Added: test1.pub
2026-02-21 16:53 iantarrant File Added: test1.pdf
2026-02-21 19:00 ale Note Added: 0053515
2026-02-22 15:33 Lynn Note Added: 0053520
2026-02-22 16:21 cbradney Note Added: 0053521
2026-02-22 16:45 cbradney Note Edited: 0053521
2026-02-22 21:27 cbradney Note Added: 0053522
2026-02-22 21:28 cbradney Issue cloned: 0017765
2026-02-22 21:28 cbradney Summary MS Publisher import needs more development => MS Publisher import needs more development: Image scaling
2026-02-22 21:28 cbradney Assigned To => cbradney
2026-02-22 21:28 cbradney Status new => resolved
2026-02-22 21:28 cbradney Resolution open => fixed
2026-02-22 21:28 cbradney Fixed in Version => 1.7.3.svn
2026-02-22 21:29 cbradney Relationship added related to 0017765
2026-02-28 14:29 cbradney Fixed in Version 1.7.3.svn => 1.6.6.svn
2026-02-28 14:29 cbradney Note Added: 0053550
2026-02-28 17:10 iantarrant Note Added: 0053551