I have never been a big fan of Microsoft Publisher.  Too many quirky behaviors for my taste.  I spend more of my time figuring out workarounds than actually designing a quality product.

Not that graphic design and layout are particular strengths of mine.

Anyway, I was recently having a big problem with producing a PDF using Publisher 2010.  I had quite a few links in the document, so using my print-to-pdf option wasn’t going to cut it.  No problem, just use the built-in Save As PDF feature, right?

Wrong.

Save as PDF maintained the links in the Publisher document, but it did something very strange.  It changed the font color from a very particular color of green from a branding guide to plain black.

The solution came from a quick Google search.

The problem was apparently that there is a color printer installed on my computer, but a black-and-white printer is my default printer.  When I changed my default printer to a color printer, and then tried Publisher’s Save As PDF routine again, the font colors came out just as I expected.

Strange.  But workarounds are kinda par for the course for Publisher.

I can hardly wait to get the whole “department newsletter” idea converted into a blog.  I’ll gladly give up working with Publisher ever again!

Thanks to this Microsoft Community post for cluing me in to where the problem was.