LibreOffice can open .pub files. Here is what it gets wrong.
LibreOffice is free, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and its drawing program, LibreOffice Draw, opens Microsoft Publisher files. For years it was one of the few programs that could open a .pub file at all. The volunteers who worked out the format did careful, useful work, and a lot of people have recovered their files with it.
So let's be fair from the start. For many documents, LibreOffice is good enough. The words are there, the pictures are there, and text boxes land close to where they should.
This post is about the files where "close" is not enough. It describes LibreOffice's Publisher import as we found it in 2026. LibreOffice is open source and keeps improving, so check the current version. If you've opened a .pub in LibreOffice and something looked wrong, here are the most common reasons, and what to do about each one.
WordArt headings disappear
Publisher users loved WordArt: arched club names, curved church headings, shadowed titles on posters. LibreOffice's Publisher import does not read the text inside WordArt. The heading is simply missing from the page. If your document's title was WordArt, you open the file and the title is gone.
Sheets of cards, labels and tickets come out as one big copy
Many Publisher files are print layouts. A business-card file prints ten cards on one sheet. A label file prints a grid of return-address labels. A booklet prints pages in folded order. Publisher keeps the instructions for that layout in the file.
LibreOffice does not read those instructions. A sheet of business cards opens as one card, enlarged to fill the page. You still have the design, but you've lost the sheet you used to print. We wrote more about these layouts in booklets, cards and labels.
Linked text boxes, crops and shrink-to-fit
Newsletters often flow one story through several linked text boxes, from page one to page four. LibreOffice does not split a story across linked boxes the way Publisher does, so text can pile up in the wrong frame.
It also skips some settings that decide exactly where text and pictures sit. Pictures you cropped in Publisher can come back uncropped. Text that Publisher shrank to fit its box comes back at full size. Line breaks can fall in different places from the original.
To be fair, there is a good side to how LibreOffice handles this. Its text boxes grow when the text does not fit, so you never lose a word off the bottom of a box. You may get a box that runs over a picture, but the text is all there.
Some tables go missing
Simple tables usually come through. Some tables in older Publisher files can be missing altogether. Calendars, timetables and price lists are the files to check. In the other direction, LibreOffice sometimes draws a table's full grid of borders where other converters miss some lines, so tables are not one-sided.
Arrowheads and older files
Lines with arrowheads arrive as plain lines, which matters on maps, diagrams and forms. And some older .pub files do not open in LibreOffice at all. You get a message that the file could not be loaded.
When LibreOffice is the right choice
LibreOffice is a good choice when the document is simple: text, a few pictures, no WordArt and no sheet of cards or labels. It is also the right tool if you want to stay offline and keep every file on your own computer, or if you want to edit the layout in Draw without paying for anything. And if you have a handful of files and the time to check each one by eye, it may be all you need.
If those fit you, install it from libreoffice.org and open your file in Draw. Check the first page against a printout or an old PDF if you have one.
When to use something else
If your file has WordArt, a print layout, linked newsletter stories or tables that matter, it's worth seeing a different result. We built our own engine to read .pub files. It reads WordArt, print layouts, linked stories, picture crops and text that shrinks to fit. You can see the result for free before you decide: the preview shows up to 100 pages of a file of up to 25 MB, with a watermark, no account needed.
If you like LibreOffice Draw as an editor, you can have both. Our ODG output writes a file that LibreOffice Draw opens directly, laid out from our own reading of your .pub file.
One more thing, said plainly. Every PubConvert conversion runs on our own engine. We don't hand difficult files to LibreOffice or to any other tool. If a file is too damaged for our engine to read, you get a clear error instead of a lower-quality result.
Preview a file free and compare it with what LibreOffice shows you.