Microsoft Publisher is gone from Microsoft 365 — batch conversion isn't the hard part, verification is
On October 1, 2026, Microsoft removed Publisher from Microsoft 365. Support for the perpetual version ends October 13, 2026. That leaves a lot of .pub files behind — especially outside large companies. For roughly thirty years, Publisher was the default desktop-publishing tool for schools, churches, clubs, and small offices: newsletters, certificates, flyers, directories. Those archives do not…
Microsoft removed Publisher from Microsoft 365 on October 1, 2026, with the support for the perpetual version ending on October 13, 2026. This leaves behind a large number of .pub files that have been the default desktop-publishing tool for schools, churches, clubs, and small offices for roughly thirty years. The standard advice is to convert everything to PDF, but the hard part is knowing which conversions have failed silently. A typical batch script for this task might look like this:
for file in * .pub ; do soffice --headless --convert-to pdf $file if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then echo "Converted: $file" fi done
However, an exit code of 0 does not guarantee that a PDF exists. During testing, two concrete cases were encountered where an exit code of 0 was produced without a PDF being generated. Additionally, a plain text file renamed to .pub can also be converted successfully, producing a PDF with no original layout. The check that catches this is the OLE2 header: a real Publisher file contains one, while a renamed text file does not.
Another potential issue is that a PDF might be produced, but its text did not survive the conversion, rendering it useless as an archive.
The verification process should result in a report categorizing each file as OK, REVIEW, or FAILED. An OK file has a PDF produced with pages and extractable text. A REVIEW file has a PDF produced but little or no extractable text, requiring visual inspection before deletion. A FAILED file has no usable PDF, possibly due to a silent failure, corrupted file, or the original file not being a real Publisher file at all.
The tool developed for this purpose is PubAudit, an open-source CLI written in Python that uses LibreOffice and poppler-utils. It can be run with a simple command, and the output will be a directory containing PDFs, a CSV report, and an HTML report. In a test run over various files, PubAudit correctly identified real files as OK, identified corrupted files as FAILED, and flagged renamed text files and truncated files as FAILED as well.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
