The booklet bug that passed its own test
If you converted a Publisher booklet to Word between 24 August and 3 September, convert it again. The text came out in the wrong panels. It's fixed now, and this post explains how it happened.
What went wrong
A booklet isn't printed in reading order. Page one shares a sheet with the last page, page two sits next to page three, and the whole thing only reads correctly once it's folded. Rearranging pages onto sheets like that is called imposition, and we do it so your booklet prints the way Publisher would print it.
Text that flows from one box to the next has to stay threaded in the right sequence through all of that. Word won't thread a chain that runs backwards. Our imposition sometimes produced exactly that kind of backwards chain, and when it did, each panel picked up the wrong piece of the story.
Nothing was lost. Every word was still in the file. It was just in the wrong place on the sheet. On one church newsletter we looked at, the standing "Worship Notes" block printed straight over that week's calendar.
Who it hit
Word files only. PDF and InDesign output were never affected.
Booklets only, meaning files where pages get imposed onto shared sheets. Ordinary documents, flyers and letters went through untouched.
In our test set it hit 25 of 897 booklet files. The other 872 came out exactly as they did before.
The failure is obvious when it happens. Text sits on a panel where it plainly doesn't belong. If your Word file read correctly, it was correct.
How it got past us
This is the part worth writing down.
Every engine change has to beat a test against Publisher's own output before it ships. The test for this one asked a single question: does our page count match Publisher's page count? It did, on every booklet in the check. The change went out.
The test never opened a rendered page and looked at it.
A booklet with scrambled text has exactly the right number of pages. So the measurement said the change was an improvement, and by the only thing it measured, it was. The code did what we asked. We asked the wrong question and got a confident answer back.
That's the honest version. It wasn't a subtle bug hiding in a corner of the code. It was a bug standing in the open, in front of a test that wasn't looking.
The fix
Two things changed.
The behaviour changed first. When a booklet can't be imposed without putting the story out of order, we don't impose it. You get the correct text at the un-imposed page count instead. A booklet that arrives as separate pages is easy to spot and easy to work with. A booklet with its paragraphs shuffled is neither of those things.
Correct content beats a matching page count. That order of priority wasn't written down anywhere before. It is now.
The test changed second. Page-count agreement no longer counts as evidence on its own for any change that moves text between frames. If a change can reorder words, something has to look at the words.
Also in this update
Word files. Seals and starbursts arrive as real shapes instead of plain rectangles. Decorative BorderArt frames come through as pictures, so floral borders and Greek key corners actually appear on the page. Grouped objects stay grouped in Word instead of arriving as a pile of loose pieces.
InDesign and Affinity files. Letter pairs like fi and fl are drawn as separate letters, matching how Publisher draws them.
Every format. Outlined text keeps its outline colour instead of coming out hollow. Clip art rotated on a diagonal is no longer squashed by having its width and height swapped. And a word marked as not underlined now wins over a paragraph style that underlines everything.
For the previous round of engine work, see the end of August update.
If a booklet of yours came out wrong, run it again. The preview is free, and conversions are unlimited for a one time $49.