[scribus-dev] ms publisher, let's solve it once and forever

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

Hi,

Few months ago when we, re-lab [1], considered what to do next, we
were asked if we could reverse engineer .pub, we said "okay. if it
works in wine". Well, it didn't. And Microsoft never replied my mail,
despite of how willing they seemed to be around 2008 to share specs
(those having attended LGM2008 know what I mean).

Since we cannot run Publisher, and you still want it supported, we
think that the best way would be for someone to temporarily join the
project and start producing .pub files per request. What we need is
someone with several hours a week of spare time, deep knowledge of MS
Publisher and a licensed copy of the app to produce lots of files with
slight changes so that we could figure out which bits contains what.

We already have experience of reverse-engineering VSD (MS Visio), so
.pubs don't hold too many fears for us, at least just yet. The
question is whether the community is willing to help itself.

[1] http://gitorious.org/re-lab

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org