If in past, you had trouble importing Microsoft Publisher documents in LibreOffice, you may get relief soon. Bernnan Vincent, a GSoC student, has created libmspub library capable of reading Microsoft Publisher files and converting it to SVG and open document format.

This library was created using reverse engineering of PUB files. Midterm evaluations of the program is over and it has got its official release and even an update to it. A summary of changes are given below:

• many more shapes supported;
• master pages;
• text in shapes, including margins;
• better support for styles, fills;
• groups and nested groups;
• better support for transformations of single objects and groups: rotations, flips.
• improved reading of images.

Partial support for linsespacing is also present in this version, but there are some bugs in displaying group of objects. Hopefully that will be resolved soon. The converter supports 2002 version file format the best, while partially supporting 97, 98 and 2000, 2010 versions. Version 2013 that is recently released has file format similar to 2010, hence one may say that libmspub supports v2013 as well.

The library will be shipped by default in LibreOffice 3.7. Till then, if you want to give it a try, you can follow the build instructions from here.