I was able to convert a Real Estate Firm from using Microsoft OSS to OpenSuse 11.2.
The Real estate agents in the firm are pleased and some are not but it’s the cost of doing business and saving money.
I am at a cross road or should I say I have come to a bump in the road. Most of the agents create their flyers and signs in Microsoft Publisher, I tried Open Office 3.X and I’m unable to open or edit the files in question.
Do have any suggestions or could you point me in the direction of a solid solution that will help me either convert the files or a program that can be used with-in OpenSuse 11.2 that can edit the files.
I understand that the first choice in linux DTP would be scribus, have experimented with it although I don’t use DTP in my work.
From this faq Frequently Asked Questions | scribus.net I don’t think proprietary formats are supported. You may be able to export to an intermediary format compatible with both apps. ODF, perhaps?
Whatever app you choose, make sure you keep your work files in the native format. It’ll avoid a lot of headaches.
>
> Hello All,
>
> I was able to convert a Real Estate Firm from using Microsoft OSS to
> OpenSuse 11.2.
>
> The Real estate agents in the firm are pleased and some are not but
> it’s the cost of doing business and saving money.
>
> I am at a cross road or should I say I have come to a bump in the road.
> Most of the agents create their flyers and signs in Microsoft Publisher,
> I tried Open Office 3.X and I’m unable to open or edit the files in
> question.
>
> Do have any suggestions or could you point me in the direction of a
> solid solution that will help me either convert the files or a program
> that can be used with-in OpenSuse 11.2 that can edit the files.
>
> Thank you for your support and time.
Went thru this at church when I installed the new server. I never did find
a usable filter to convert the Publisher files already in the library nor
could I convince the office staff that something else was just as good so I
wound up installing their old XP in a VirtualBox VM so that they could run
their old version Publisher. If you come across a converter for those
files that will allow translating them to whatever solution you come up
with it would be much appreciated if you could post that solution. I would
love to get the office on all Linux apps but this one has me stumped (along
with Flight Simulator, but that’s another tale of woe).
This is precisely why Virtualbox is such an important “killer app” for Linux, because it can solve all these problems of proprietary lock-in. Handle legacy files with MS Publisher in VB, and train your staff to use OpenOffice and/or Scribus in future.
Desktop publishing application file formats are very un-portable.
OpenOffice writer doesn’t cut it (even less than Microsoft Word does). KOffice’s Writer is actually not too bad, from the few minutes I tried it out. Didn’t fool around much with templates but it includes the Text boxes and handles placement better.
Scribus is too clunky, and professionally-orientated while MS Publisher makes it pretty easy.
Somebody sent me a link to a website that will convert various file formats (including .pub) into PDFs. While not ideal, it will allow you to turn the existing files into PDFs without having to install Virtualbox/WinXP/Publisher.
Most people, I’ve found, say “Scribus” and walk away. If you’ve used Publisher you know that Scribus doesn’t include any of the features that make Publisher easy.
Microsoft Publisher format isn’t supported on anything else to my knowledge; AFAIK even MS hasn’t done any development on it for years because it was just a freebe thrown into Office.
It is possible to extract the text from Publisher files by opening them in Kate and then copying and pasting but not any of the formatting or the images.
OK Scribus comes with a learning curve but at least you are not locked in in the same way as you are with Publisher and you have a lot more options.
Have you tried running Publisher on Crossover? It runs Windows software as a native window on a Linux machine. You have to pay for it, but it’s low cost and worth every penny. You can try it for free.
when I’ve tried in with CodeWeavers (when they were giving it away for free) and with Wine I haven’t been able to get it running.
A description I found for KWord (part of KOffice)
KWord is a FrameMaker-like word processing and desktop publishing application. KWord is capable of creating demanding and professional looking documents. It can be used for desktop publishing, but also for “normal” word processing, like writing letters, reports and so on.
This package is part of the KDE Office Suite.
>
>Hello All,
>
>I was able to convert a Real Estate Firm from using Microsoft OSS to
>OpenSuse 11.2.
>
>The Real estate agents in the firm are pleased and some are not but
>it’s the cost of doing business and saving money.
>
>I am at a cross road or should I say I have come to a bump in the road.
>Most of the agents create their flyers and signs in Microsoft Publisher,
>I tried Open Office 3.X and I’m unable to open or edit the files in
>question.
>
>Do have any suggestions or could you point me in the direction of a
>solid solution that will help me either convert the files or a program
>that can be used with-in OpenSuse 11.2 that can edit the files.
>
>Thank you for your support and time.
On a different tack you might try OpenOffice Impress.
The strange thing is that the OP hasn’t replied to all this. Seems odd to me that a real estate agent would convert to Linux without checking that its flyers and signs would be readable in Linux software, when so much of a real estate business depends on flyers and signs.
As I said before, use Virtualbox to run MS Publisher for as long as you have to. Move to something else for new stuff, there’s plenty in Linux that can easily cope with the simple DTP requirements of a real estate agent: Scribus, while good, would probably be overkill. I’ve never seen a real estate flyer that I couldn’t reproduce in OOo in three minutes flat.