How we measure accuracy
Last measured 28 September 2026, against LibreOffice 26.8.0.3.
The homepage says 97% of pages come out of Publican without defects, against 51% for LibreOffice. This page explains where those numbers come from, so you can judge them for yourself.
The results
| Publican | LibreOffice | |
|---|---|---|
| Documents with the right number of pages | 100% | 82% |
| Text on the right page | 99.6% | 84% |
| Pages without defects | 97% | 51% |
| Pages faithful or close to the original | 84% | 30% |
Each program with the fonts it comes with.
The test files
Real .pub files from every version of Publisher, from 2.0 (1993) to 2021: newsletters, brochures, bulletins, booklets, cards, certificates, menus, forms, labels and posters, in several languages. One of them is a newsletter we made in Publisher 2021, shown side by side in the comparison.
The reference
Every file was opened in Microsoft Publisher 2021 on Windows and exported as a PDF by Publisher itself. Those PDFs are what the other programs are measured against, page by page.
What each program was given
- Publican opened each file and drew every page with the free fonts it ships in place of Microsoft's, as most visitors will see it.
- LibreOffice 26.8.0.3 opened each file with its own .pub reader and exported it as a PDF, with the fonts that come with it.
What we measure
For every page of every file, comparing each program's page with Publisher's:
- Page count: whether the document has the same number of pages as in Publisher. A missing or extra page pushes everything after it onto the wrong page.
- Text on the right page: the share of Publisher's words that appear on the same page, in the same order.
- Text anywhere: the share that appear on the page at all, however they are laid out.
- At a glance: the two pages are shrunk to a third of their size and compared for where the ink is, as a reader glancing at the page would.
What counts as a defect
Each page gets one of four grades:
- Faithful: at least 99.8% of the words, no line lost, at least 95% of lines breaking where Publisher's do, and the same at a glance.
- Good: at least 99% of the words, no line lost, at least 80% of lines breaking in the same places, and very close at a glance.
- Flawed: at least 95% of the words are somewhere on the page, and at a glance it is at least half the same, but things have moved.
- Broken: more than 5% of the page's text is missing, or at a glance more than half the page is different.
A page without defects is one that isn't broken. "Faithful or close" counts the faithful and good pages.
What Publican still gets wrong
No program is perfect, and we list what we know about:
- 3D WordArt is drawn flat.
- The outline, emboss, engrave and shadow character effects aren't drawn.
- Decorative borders in files from Publisher 97 and earlier can't be drawn, because Publisher kept them in the program rather than in the file.
- Some lines break in different places from Publisher: Publisher hyphenates some words differently from the dictionaries we use, and for a few fonts we don't yet have Microsoft's character widths. With Microsoft Office's fonts installed, choose Use my installed fonts in Chrome or Edge.
- It can't yet save back to .pub.
If a file doesn't look right, please send it to [email protected]. It's used only to fix the problem, then deleted, and it will make the next version better.