Municipal offices and libraries: public notices, event calendars and program guides
Town halls and public libraries made a lot of paper with Publisher. Public hearing notices. The parks and recreation program guide. The library's monthly events calendar, the summer reading flyer and the sign on the meeting room door. Many of these files are also public records, and someone is responsible for keeping them.
Microsoft removed Publisher from Microsoft 365 on 1 October 2026. Offices that still have Publisher 2021 or LTSC 2021 installed can keep using it, but Microsoft's support for those versions ends on 13 October 2026. Either way, a records archive in .pub format now depends on a program that is leaving. It's a good time to move it into formats that will still open in twenty years.
PDF for the record
For anything that is finished and kept for retention, convert to PDF. A PDF shows the notice exactly as it was posted: the same layout, the same page breaks, the same date in the same place. Anyone can open it without special software.
The text in our PDFs is real text, not a picture of the page. You can select it, copy it and search it. A records clerk can search a folder of converted notices for a street name or a hearing date and find it. That is a big step up from a scan of a printed copy.
A note on accessibility. The PDFs we make are not tagged for accessibility, and we don't claim they meet an accessibility standard. If your office needs tagged PDFs, a PDF that already contains real text is a much better starting point than a scan. You can add the tags afterwards in Adobe Acrobat or a similar tool, and you don't need to run text recognition first.
Keep the original .pub files next to the PDFs. Your retention schedule decides how long the records stay. The .pub originals are worth keeping as long as the PDFs, in case you ever need to convert again.
Calendars and program guides
Event calendars are tables. Each day is a cell, with a large date number and a few small lines of text under it. Some calendars shade weekends, some hide the grid. One wrong border and a calendar stops reading as a calendar. We spent a lot of work on this and wrote about it in calendar cells, done right. After converting, check a busy month and make sure each event sits under the right date.
Program guides are often longer documents with many pages, columns of class listings and photos. These convert to PDF for the record. If your staff build next season's guide from last season's file, convert that file to Word too so the template stays editable. If a designer lays out the guide in InDesign or Affinity Publisher, convert it to IDML instead.
Converting a records folder
For a records archive, a few hundred files is normal. The website takes up to 20 files and 2 GB in one job. A simple way to work:
- Copy the folder you want to convert to a working location, so the originals on the records drive are not touched.
- Sort the files by year or by department, the same way your retention schedule is organised.
- Preview two or three of the hardest files free: a full calendar month and a long program guide. The preview takes up to 100 pages and 25 MB per file.
- Convert each year or department to PDF, 20 files at a time, and save the PDFs next to the originals.
- Convert the templates you still use to Word, in a separate folder.
- Keep a simple list of what is done, so you know which folders still need work.
For a very large archive, the PubConvert app for Windows runs the same engine on your own PC. It does not have the website's job caps, and nothing is uploaded, which some records policies require.
On the website, uploaded files are deleted when the conversion or download finishes, and abandoned jobs are removed within one hour. We don't keep copies.
The cost
The preview is free and needs no account. Full access is a one-time $49 for as many conversion jobs as you like, up to 20 files and 2 GB per job. There is no subscription, so there is nothing to put through the budget again next year.
Preview a public notice free to see how it comes out.