Microsoft Publisher is a
desktop publishing application from
Microsoft, differing from
Microsoft Word in that the emphasis is placed on
page layout
In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives.
The high-level page layout involves deciding on the ov ...
and
graphic design
Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscipli ...
rather than text composition and
proofreading
Proofreading is the reading of a galley proof or an electronic copy of a publication to find and correct reproduction errors of text or art. Proofreading is the final step in the editorial cycle before publication.
Professional
Traditional ...
.
Overview
Publisher is included in higher-end editions of
Microsoft Office, reflecting Microsoft's emphasis on the application as an easy-to-use and less expensive alternative to the "heavyweights" with a focus on the small-business market, where firms do not have dedicated design professionals available to make marketing materials and other documents.
However, it has a relatively small share of the desktop publishing market, which is dominated by
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, ...
and formerly by
QuarkXPress.
While most Microsoft Office apps adopted
ribbons for their user interface starting with
Microsoft Office 2007, Publisher retained its
toolbars and did not adopt ribbons until
Microsoft Office 2010.
Compatibility
LibreOffice has supported Publisher's
proprietary file format
A proprietary file format is a file format of a company, organization, or individual that contains data that is ordered and stored according to a particular encoding-scheme, designed by the company or organization to be secret, such that the decodi ...
(.pub) since February 2013.
Corel Draw
CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation. It is also the name of the Corel graphics suite, which includes the bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs (see below ...
X4 features read-only support.
Publisher supports numerous other file formats, including the
Enhanced Metafile (EMF) format, which is supported on Windows platforms. The Microsoft Publisher
trial version can be used to view .pub files beyond the trial period.
Adobe PageMaker
Adobe PageMaker (formerly Aldus) is a discontinued desktop publishing computer program introduced in 1985 by the Aldus Corporation on the Apple Macintosh. The combination of the Macintosh's graphical user interface, PageMaker publishing software, ...
also saved files with a .pub extension, but the two file formats were unrelated and incompatible.
Release history
See also
*
Ventura Publisher, the first popular desktop publishing package for IBM PC compatible computers
*
Timeworks Publisher (a major competitor in the marketplace in the early 1990s)
References
External links
*
Microsoft Publisher blog(last updated December 2009) on
MSDN Blogs
{{Microsoft Office
Desktop publishing software
Publisher
Products introduced in 1991