EPUB/DOCX/RTF export for Publisher?

[marcdraco]

Someone else might have already asked this, but I hit this bumper yesterday after spending a couple of days typesetting a book for a mate of mine. Despite her seeing all the spreads with printers marks etc. (I won't bother you all with the usual boilerplate we're all professionals here) she emailed back asking for it in ... DOCX or EPUB.

My heart sank. The Word 365 she'd sent me was riddled with all sorts of typographic errors and bug-u-likes from some random binary that she'd entered probably hitting the alt key or some such. Publisher (to its credit) did a much better job of filtering these nasties leaving me with a nice clean master of her work to typeset. As it turns out, what I produced could have been done in Word or something compatible but I wanted to see how Publisher 2 was fairing. 

Had I known that she was targeting KDP (Kindle) a priori as it were I'd obviously not have used Publisher since Kindle is really just a proprietary set of HTML extensions so the machine can lay it out using internal fonts and flow it as it needs to across devices - a la HTML. I don't know (I haven't bothered to look too close since I come from a print background in this side of things)  if it even supports things like left/right pages with nicely formatted footer, page numbers and so on. I've only ever done one book for Kindle in .mobi format and the same manuscript in EPUB which was a massive chore even in some dedicated software I bought to do the job.

Anyway, that's a long story for a simple request.

[walt.farrell]

Unfortunately, it's a complex request to satisfy, with unfortunately no short-term solution. There's no export to any of those formats today.

If all your text is in one set of linked Text Frames, you could try clicking in the first frame, doing Ctrl+A or Cmd+A depending on your OS, and then doing a Copy. Then perhaps you could Paste into Word or LibreOffice, or maybe Sigil or Calibre or another epub editor. That would get you a lot of it.

Or maybe someone else will have a good idea.

[ashf]

Epub would be complicated thing, but you can upload the exported pdf to OneDrive and convert it into a Word file.

[tudor]

@marcdraco you could try copying the text from Publisher and paste it into a blank Word file. I did this several times from Publisher to InDesign, it even preserved the styles and formatting.

[dcr]

On the upside, Amazon doesn't use .mobi anymore, so you no longer have to worry about that format anymore.  I learned that a couple months ago when I finished a book and created the .mobi file only to discover I needed epub instead.  Sigil worked out well for putting the epub together, once I got the hang of using Sigil.  But, I had my files in HTML already so YMMV.