IDML files now keep more of your text
A fix went live on 15 September. If you converted a file to IDML between 3 September and 15 September, convert it again. The text that went missing should come back, and it costs nothing extra.
This post explains what was wrong, who it reached, what we changed, and how our own check waved it through.
What wasn't working
A lot of Publisher documents have a big rectangle drawn around the page. An outline with nothing inside it, sitting there as decoration. Newsletters and church bulletins are full of them.
In InDesign, an object can be marked so that text flows around it rather than under it. That is what you want for a photo in the middle of a column. We were marking those decorative borders the same way.
A border that size is almost as big as the page. So the text asked for somewhere to go, found no room anywhere inside the frame, and InDesign held the whole story back rather than placing part of it. InDesign calls that overset text.
Nothing was lost. Every word was still in the file, sitting in the story where we put it. It just never reached the page.
Who it affected
IDML files. PDF, Word and ODG output were never affected.
Files with a large outlined shape behind the text. A document without one went through untouched.
Of the files we checked that had this shape, roughly one in four lost a tenth or more of their text. A few lost all of it. On one bulletin the border covered about three quarters of the sheet, and not one character of the two thousand in that story was placed.
How to tell if it hit your file
Open the file in InDesign and look at the bottom right corner of a text frame. A small red plus sign there means the frame is holding text it is not showing. Affinity Publisher shows its own overflow marker in the same place.
The simplest check: run the free preview on the same file. This fault never affected the preview, so if the preview has a paragraph your IDML does not, that is this.
What we fixed
Two changes went in.
A shape now has to have a real relationship with the text before we ask the text to flow around it. A decorative border sitting behind everything no longer qualifies.
And when a frame ends up with no usable room anyway, we now tell InDesign to ignore the wrap and place the words, rather than holding them back. A page with text slightly overlapping a border beats a page with no text at all.
The first version of that fix broke something else. Pages that inherit repeating furniture from a master spread started wrapping against the wrong thing. We found it in the check, fixed it, and shipped both together. It seems worth telling you that the repair needed a repair.
How it got past us
This is the part worth writing down, because we have been here before.
Every engine change has to beat a check against Publisher's own output before it ships. That check compared pictures. It rendered our page, rendered Publisher's page, and measured how similar the two images were.
A page with a missing paragraph still looks a great deal like a page. Same borders, same headings, same photos, same colours, text in roughly the same places. The similarity score barely moved. So the measurement said the change was fine, and by the one thing it measured, it was.
Twelve days ago a booklet bug got past a check that counted pages and never looked at one. This time a text drop got past a check that looked at pages and never counted the words on them. Same shape of mistake, a different blind spot.
We now count the characters that actually land on the page and compare that count with Publisher's. A number like that cannot shrug off missing text, because missing text is the one thing it measures.
What to do
Convert the file again. It costs nothing extra, and access you have already bought still works.
If you have not bought yet, the preview is free and shows you the pages before you decide. Downloads are a one-time $49 purchase.