Am I the only one still wanting Publisher functionality?

[mediagiant]

With all the iterations of OpenOffice and LibreOffice over the years, I’m really surprised that there has not been a real attempt to add Microsoft Publisher functionality. (InDesign functionality would be even better, but that’s asking quite a bit.)

I realize that there is Scribus out there and that this would be a big undertaking, but even that can’t open Publisher or InDesign files. I get that LibreOffice is focused on the basic applications of Microsoft Office, but adding Publisher functionality – even to the Writer application – would be huge to me.

Honestly with all of the advanced features Microsoft is cramming into Word I don’t see why they can’t combine it with Publisher. You can already create newsletters, business cards and other publications with Word. But LibreOffice can do it!

[hyogapag]

Well, I think you’ll be happy to read these pages :

LibreOffice MS Publisher Import filter - young but strong baby

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#Filters
So it seems next iteration of LibreOffice will include a MS Publisher filter, so that you can open them within Draw.

[StarSt0rm]

Yay! So LibreOffice is starting to be compatible with MS Publisher? That’s awesome! I wonder if they’ll add an export filter as well in a later stage after the import filter is stable?

[rik-shaw]

Unfortunately for us, the main blocker with using Draw for “MS Publisher style documents” is that text cannot flow from one frame (page) to the next. We are fine with some of the import issues garbling some layout in .pub files (we can exclusively use Draw). But, if we can’t have text flow between pages it is a big barrier toward making literacy primer booklets (our main use case).

See this bug report:

LO Bug 68589