Original Summary

Microsoft is removing Publisher from Microsoft 365 on October 1, and perpetual versions stop getting support on October 13. That leaves a lot of people stuck: church offices, schools, small businesses, and designers with 10 to 30 years of newsletters, bulletins, and flyers in a format nothing else opens well. If you've been searching for a Microsoft Publisher alternative or replacement, this is what I built, and why. The existing options all reflow the layout. LibreOffice and Scribus import .pub, and Affinity opens some files, but text boxes shift, fonts swap, and pages break and requires significant rework. For someone with hundreds of files, that means redoing every one. So I built PubKeep, a desktop app for Windows and Mac that opens .pub files page for page and keeps them editable. It has the same text boxes, master pages, and fold-over booklets, with a ribbon that looks the way Publisher users expect, because most of them don't want to learn something new. It saves to its own format, and there's also a converter that turns whole folders of .pub files into exact PDFs. Some things I learned along the way: The format was the hard part. .pub is an undocumented binary format with decades of quirks. This took a lot of time and iteration to get right. The users aren't who I expected. They skew older, and many are church secretaries. That changed a lot of the UI: bigger text, real tooltips, and keeping ribbon labels where I'd normally use icons. Where it is now: 670+ on the waitlist, and almost all of them are invited to early access. The paid Founder license launches this week as a one-time purchase with no subscription. Microsoft pulled Publisher out of a subscription people were still paying for, so it felt wrong to answer that with another subscription. My biggest challenge right now is getting non-technical users from the invite email to a working install. Windows SmartScreen warnings on a new code-signing certificate are a big part of it. If you've shipped a desktop app to a non-technical audience, I'd love to hear what helped. https://pubkeep.com/desktop   submitted by   /u/No-Needleworker-6965 [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/9/29 00:06:08