During my tenure as head of prepress for a commercial printer, I had all manner of files foisted upon me accompanied by the statement, "the customer said everything is on this (3.5" floppy) disk and it's ready to print". The person making that statement on behalf of the customer was usually someone from sales who had little if no interest in making sure that customer had any idea of what was required for an electronic submission to be useable. Unless, of course, that sales person had to go back and tell the customer that their files were unusable and that the price quoted for producing their job did not include the cost of typesetting and laying the job out.
Many times, the cost of educating the customer by walking them through the submission process, or just setting the job up yourself was a wash. Usually a determining factor was whether that same customer would be bringing in "ready to print" files on disk in the future. In the case of the latter, the investment of time educating the customer could pay off, sometimes.
For all of those reasons, I found it necessary to create materials for the sales staff to use to try to cover some of the basics of file submissions. It makes good sense for any commercial printer to take file submissions on a variety of medial and file formats. At the very least the submission can be imported into a layout as plain (ASCII) text saving keystrokes time.
The key to taking file submissions is being familiar with the garden variety of programs being used by novices and professionals, and possessing a good toolbelt of conversion utilities. Good conversion utilities are the only way to handle the profusion of word processing and "desktop publishing" programs in use by the layman. We'll be covering those topics, in particular, the latter in future articles, for today we are faced with a disk with a Microsoft Publisher file.
The answer to running a "Publisher" file to an output device is really pretty simple. First you have the customer save the file as a ".prn". That means instead of saving the file you print to a file. The key to the whole thing is getting the customer to select a printer driver that will create a Postscript print file with a resolution that's high enough for output with whatever line screen is required (usually 133 to 150 lpi). The printer driver that's suggested in the FAQ that Microsoft has posted is the "MS Publisher Imagesetter driver". The trouble with that suggestion is that I've yet to meet anyone who's been able to find this mysterious print driver recommended by Microsoft, including myself. It's not on the MS Publisher CD, the Windoze 95 CD or anywhere in their confusing labyrinth of a web site. So my solution is to use one of the standard HP drivers that are usually included in most Windows system installations. Just make sure that the driver supports a resolution of 600 dpi and is capable of Postscript output. Most of the HP laser printers fit that category. Then, on the Windows machine that is in possession of that hack MS Publisher:

• Microsoft Publisher 97
• Microsoft Publisher for Windows 95, version 3.0
  

1. Call the printing company and ask them how many lines per inch they can print well. The answer will typically be either 60, 80, 100, or 133 lines per inch.

2. Before you create your PostScript file, do the following (these instructions assume you are using Windows 95):

a. Open the Printers folder.

b. With the right mouse button, click the MS Publisher Imagesetter driver (or the printer driver you will be using to create your PostScript file.)

c. Click Properties.

d. Click the Graphics tab.

e. Select the Use Settings Below button.

f. In the Screen Frequency box, type the number determined in step 1 (or you can use a lower number).

g. Click OK.