Publisher files in Chinese, Japanese and Korean
If your .pub files are in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, the good news comes first. The characters in your document come through as characters. They are not turned into pictures of text, and they are not swapped for question marks. You can search the PDF, copy a line out of it, or edit the text in Word.
The problem people usually see is not the text. It is the font.
Why fonts are the hard part
A Chinese, Japanese or Korean font holds a huge set of characters, far more than a Latin font, and many documents name a face that is common on one system and missing on another. A Publisher file made on a Japanese Windows PC may ask for a face that a computer set up for English does not have. Publisher on that PC showed the page correctly. The same file on another computer has to find something else.
When a converter does not have the face your document names, it has to choose a stand-in. A careless choice gives you a page in the wrong style, such as a brush-style face replaced by a plain one, or characters that are wider or narrower than the original, so lines break in new places. In the worst case, the converter picks a face that has no Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters at all, and you see rows of empty boxes.
We wrote about this in general in when you don't have the font and when you do have the font. For CJK files the same rules apply, with more at stake, because there are more characters to cover.
What each output format does
Word and IDML files keep the original font names from your .pub file. Nothing is renamed. If the font is installed on your computer, Word or InDesign uses it, and your text looks the way it did in Publisher. If it is not installed, your program picks its own replacement, and you can install the font later and the text picks it up.
The PDF is different, because a PDF has to carry its letters inside the file. When the original CJK face is not available, the converter uses a stand-in. It does not pick one generic face for every file. It looks for clues in your document: which Chinese, Japanese or Korean faces the document names, and which face already covers the same characters elsewhere in the same text. It uses those clues to pick a stand-in that suits your document. Japanese kana and Korean Hangul also tell the converter which language the text is in, which helps it choose.
The result is that your PDF shows real characters in a style that suits the document, even when the exact original face is not available. If a document names no CJK face at all and gives no other clue, look at its pages closely in the preview.
Two things to check
Vertical text, where characters run top to bottom in columns, is a weaker spot. If your document uses vertical frames, look at those pages carefully in the preview before you rely on them. Also note that Affinity does not support vertical text at the time of writing; its help centre says "RTL text support and vertical text aren't currently available in Affinity". If you have vertical text and plan to keep editing, Word or InDesign is a better home for it than Affinity.
The other check is style. A stand-in face shows the right characters, but it may not match the exact look of the original. For a certificate or a poster, where the look is the point, use Word or IDML and install the original font, or keep the PDF as a reference copy.
How to try it
- Drop your .pub file on the home page.
- Look through the free preview. It shows the PDF, up to 100 pages and 25 MB per file, with a watermark and no account needed.
- Check that the characters are correct and that headings look the way you expect.
- If you need to edit, download Word or IDML and install the fonts your document uses.
Access is a one-time $49 for as many conversion jobs as you like, up to 20 files and 2 GB per job.
Preview your file free to see how your characters come out.