The printing industry rejoices: Microsoft to discontinue Publisher in 2026

[jmowreader]

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-publisher-will-no-longer-be-supported-after-october-2026-ee6302a2-4bc7-4841-babf-8e9be3acbfd7

Microsoft Publisher is Microsoft's entry into the Desktop Publishing market. Its advantages are that it is cheap to buy and easy to use if you already know MS Office. Its disadvantages come if you're trying to print your job on a press - it is totally unsuited for the purpose.

They realized that the things Publisher is suited for - if you're printing to your office printer it's okay-but-not-great - can be done just as well in Word or PowerPoint, and they're asking their customers to migrate their designs to those two programs.

[UTUSN]

1. It's my only thing for editing pictures into to .jpg - i don't Save anything in Publisher format.

Will our .jpg old pics still be here?

[jmowreader]

3. They say no Publisher files will be openable after that date

JPGs should be able to be opened in an image handling program like Photoshop.

[Drum]

2. When I had a desk job, Publisher was on my desktop, I appreciated making a quick b'day card...

Simple things like that, it was nice.

[hunter]

4. Most of the local print shops I used to work with are gone.

This is another business the internet wiped out and our world is a little uglier for it.

Our local newspaper isn't even printed here any more.

[jmowreader]

5. It's not just small papers

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has been printed in Mobile, AL, since 2016. This was announced in 2014 so Hurricane Katrina had nothing to do with it.

Not only the Internet but also the high-end copier and the digital press killed the small offset trade. We have an HP Indigo digital press at the shop. It does one massive thing a conventional offset press operator can’t dream of - variable-data printing. I used to print a shitload of 4/4 postcards on a 28-inch Akiyama, and to put the addresses on them we had to send them to a mailhouse in Raleigh to be inkjetted. Our Indigo will print them right on the cards during the run. When our HR lady was new our Big Boss took her around to introduce her to everyone, and I was upstairs making newspaper plates at the time. All our commercial gear is in the same room, so I said, “let me tell you what all this stuff is.” We get to the Indigo and we start talking VDP: “Let’s say Parker Toyota’s service department wants to sell service to all the people who bought new cars in the last two years from them. They can send us a file with the names, cars they bought including color, the service they want to sell - some people need only an oil change, others might need new brake fluid or new transmission fluid - and access to Toyota’s database of pictures of their cars, and we can send Joe Smith a card with a picture of a red Tacoma and Susan Jones one with a picture of a black Camry…and put both cards on the same sheet of paper.” She was like “how can they do that?” “HP puts it in the sales brochure that the system does that exact thing - it’s not all that hard, you have a file you feed into the VDP program that tells it what to put where on the card. The only problem is, you need a sales person who can sell this because it’s something you absolutely cannot do on the presses everyone’s familiar with. But if you have that, everyone will want it - and the machine will print 5000 custom postcards as easily as it’ll print 5000 identical ones.”

The only drawback to it is an Indigo is a seven-figure machine so not everyone can get one.

[hunter]

6. So EXPENSIVE digital printing machines...

... made the older machines in smaller "mom and pop" print shops obsolete.

If a small city can't support one of these modern "seven figure" digital printing machines people have to send the work off via the internet or make do with what they've got -- some laser printer they bought at Best Buy and Microsoft Publisher, or the color copiers at the UPS Store.

Either way face-to-face interactions and advice from professional printers are gone.

[jmowreader]

7. Very, very expensive digital printing machines

This is NOT the machine we have....that thing on the left side of the image is the HP PageWide Web Press T490 HD. It's 60 feet long, 11 feet high, and pulls 42-inch paper through itself at 1000 feet per minute. It also does variable data printing. It uses 200-liter (that's 52 gallons) ink cartridges, and there are five - bonding agent and CMYK. I have NO idea what this costs. You know you're in trouble when your inkjet printer has catwalks. The heads on this are weird - they are long bars that go all the way across the sheet. If the Indigo is any indication, how they handle consumables is through a service agreement: for x thousand dollars a month they send you all the ink and printheads you need. What they do is look at your last month's consumption (the machine talks to HP headquarters) and send you enough new material on the first of the month to get you to the end of next month.