Publisher to GIF Converter

Publisher to GIF: What This Actually Produces

A .pub file is a Microsoft Publisher publication — a proprietary desktop-publishing layout that only Publisher itself, a Windows-only application, opens natively. Converting one to GIF is a three-stage job here: the publication is imported and laid out as a PDF, each page of that PDF is rendered to a bitmap, and the bitmaps are assembled into a single animated GIF where each page is one frame. That last part surprises people, so it is worth saying plainly: this is not "one GIF per page". It is a page-flip animation, it loops forever, and at the preselected frame rate it flips through ten pages a second. The speed is yours to change; the looping is not exposed anywhere. Everything below sets out which controls reach the encoder and which are along for the ride.

How to Convert Publisher to GIF

1. Upload the .pub File: Drag the publication onto the page or click "Add Files". Several publications can be queued at once; the Combine? control decides whether they become one animation or one GIF each.
2. Set the Frame Rate First: FRAMERATE is preselected at 10 FPS, which means ten pages per second — far too fast to read. For a document you want someone to look at, drop it to 1 or 2 FPS.
3. Set Image Resolution and Image Quality: Both live under File Compression → Custom. Image resolution opens on "Keep original", which in practice hands the encoder no size limit of its own and lets it fall back to roughly an 800 × 600 canvas; choose a preset height, a width or a percentage if you want to control the dimensions. Image quality (%) is preselected at 80 and is the encoder's own quality dial.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the GIF. No sign-up and no watermark; files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours.

Which Controls Reach the GIF Encoder

The animation is built by gifski, which takes exactly three things from the option panel. The rest of the panel belongs to other conversion routes and does nothing here — that is worth knowing before you spend time tuning a palette that never gets used.

Frame Rate Means Pages Per Second

GIF stores each frame's delay as an integer number of centiseconds, so the frame rates that map cleanly onto it are the ones that divide 100: 50, 25, 20, 10, 5, 2 and 1 FPS give exact, even delays. The others in the list — 30, 15, 12 and 8 FPS — cannot be expressed exactly, so the encoder mixes neighbouring delay values across frames and the animation runs slightly unevenly. On a page-flip animation nobody notices; if you care, stay on a divisor of 100.

Some practical settings:

• A readable flip-through of a multi-page brochure: 1 FPS gives a full second per page, 2 FPS a half-second.
• A quick "here is the whole thing" preview: 5 FPS, which is still five pages a second but reads as motion rather than a strobe.
• A single-page flyer: the frame rate is irrelevant. One page cannot animate, so the encoder duplicates the frame to make a valid file and the result looks like a still image.

If the Conversion Fails

.pub is an undocumented Microsoft format, and reading it outside Publisher means reconstructing it — here through the Publisher import filter that LibreOffice uses, originally from the Document Liberation Project. It is good, but it is a reimplementation of a moving target, so heavily layered publications, unusual fonts, linked assets that live outside the file, and files from very old or very new Publisher versions can shift, substitute or fail outright.

When that happens, do the layout step in Publisher itself: open the publication, export or print it to PDF, and then use PDF to GIF for the same page-flip animation, or PDF to PNG for one clean still per page. Publisher's own PDF export is the only renderer that knows exactly what your layout meant, so it is also the highest-fidelity route even when the direct conversion works.

GIF Against the Alternatives for a Publisher Page

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a multi-page publication become one animated GIF or one GIF per page?

One animated GIF, with each page as a frame. That is the opposite of what the other image targets do — Publisher to PNG and Publisher to JPG write one still per page and hand them back as a ZIP. GIF is the single target on this pipeline that assembles pages into an animation, which is why the frame-rate control appears here and nowhere else.

Why does my GIF flip through the pages too fast to read?

Because the frame rate is preselected at 10 FPS and each page is a frame, so a ten-page publication is over in one second. Set FRAMERATE to 1 FPS for a second per page or 2 FPS for half a second. There is no separate "hold the last page" control, and no way to stop the loop — the output always repeats.

Why is my GIF smaller than the page I rendered?

Because the encoder applies its own size ceiling of roughly 800 × 600 when nothing else constrains it, and "Keep original" — the preselected choice under Image resolution — passes no explicit dimensions. A full 300 DPI A4 render is 2480 × 3508 px, and what comes back is a proportionally scaled version of that. Pick a preset height, a width, or a percentage under Image resolution to set the size you actually want.

Do the Colors and Dither settings do anything?

Not on this route. They render in the panel because the same option group serves other GIF conversions, but the encoder used here takes only the frame rate, the quality percentage and the size — it derives its own palette per frame, up to the 256 colours the GIF format allows. If you need hand-controlled palette reduction, take a PNG per page and quantize it in an image editor.

My publication has photographs and the GIF looks banded. What should I use instead?

PNG or JPG. GIF is limited to an indexed palette of at most 256 colours per frame, so photographs and smooth gradients get quantized and dithered, which reads as speckling or banding. Publisher to PNG keeps millions of colours losslessly and is the right target for a photo-heavy page.

Will the text in my publication still be selectable?

No. Every page is flattened to pixels before the GIF is assembled, so text, shapes and vector art become a bitmap with nothing to select, search or edit. If the text needs to stay live, convert to Publisher to PDF instead — the same layout step, but the output keeps real text objects.

How faithful is the layout, given that .pub is a proprietary format?

Simple single-page flyers, certificates and logo sheets usually come through cleanly. Complex publications are the risk: the file is read by an open-source reimplementation of an undocumented format, so heavy layering, unusual or non-embedded fonts and externally linked assets can shift or be substituted. Spot-check anything complicated, and export a PDF from Publisher itself when the layout has to be exact.

How are my files handled, and how long are they kept?

The publication is uploaded over an encrypted connection and converted on our servers — no Publisher licence and no installed software needed at your end. Uploads and outputs are deleted automatically after a few hours, are never shared or made public, and no account is required. Nothing is watermarked. For very large publications the practical constraint is upload time, not the page count.