[scribus] ms publisher, let's solve it once and forever

[Jim Ford]

On 12/22/2010 12:07 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Few months ago when we, re-lab [1], considered what to do next, we
> were asked if we could reverse engineer .pub, we said "okay. if it
> works in wine". Well, it didn't. And Microsoft never replied my mail,
> despite of how willing they seemed to be around 2008 to share specs
> (those having attended LGM2008 know what I mean).
> 
> Since we cannot run Publisher, and you still want it supported, we
> think that the best way would be for someone to temporarily join the
> project and start producing .pub files per request. What we need is
> someone with several hours a week of spare time, deep knowledge of MS
> Publisher and a licensed copy of the app to produce lots of files with
> slight changes so that we could figure out which bits contains what.
> 
> We already have experience of reverse-engineering VSD (MS Visio), so
> .pubs don't hold too many fears for us, at least just yet. The
> question is whether the community is willing to help itself.

Well done - I wish I could help. Anyone that can help prise the dead
hand of Microsoft off the computing community is a hero in my eyes!

Jim