Engine update: many to a sheet, and cleaner InDesign files
Another round of engine work is live. The method doesn't change: we put our output next to Publisher's own output and fix what differs. Here's what moved.
Label and card sheets use the grid Publisher stored. A sheet of return address labels, raffle tickets, or business cards is one design repeated in a grid. Publisher writes that grid into the file: the margin to the first copy, the gap between copies, how many across and down. We were reading part of it and working out the rest ourselves. We now use what's stored. Sheets now come out with the right number of copies and the right positions.
Publisher's packing rule is not the label maker's. This one took a while to pin down. Take a sheet of four by two inch shipping labels, two across and five down on US Letter. The label die says the vertical step is exactly two inches. Publisher doesn't use two inches. It also doesn't spread the copies evenly across the whole sheet. It fits them into the printable area, the part a printer can actually reach, with equal gaps. That works out to a step of 152.22 points where the die says 144. Once we knew to look for it, the rule matched what Publisher actually does. For the background on why print layouts are their own problem, see booklets, cards and labels.
Shapes that used to vanish come back. An empty picture frame in Publisher, the placeholder box before anyone drops a photo in, has a thin rim around it. We were drawing nothing at all, so a photo column in a newsletter came out as blank paper. Checkboxes on a form had the same problem. Both draw their rim now.
BorderArt inside a group survives the trip to InDesign. Publisher's decorative frame borders, the ones made of repeating little images, only came through when the frame sat on its own. Put it inside a group, which is where most of them live, and the border disappeared. On the files we tracked, missing borders went from 34 to 9.
Text wrap behaves in Affinity. We were marking too many objects as contour wrappers, and Affinity Publisher responded by emptying the text frames next to them. Now only actual figures get a contour, and text frames, lines and groups keep the simpler wrap. Neighbouring frames keep their text.
Decorated WordArt banners stop getting clipped. Some of Publisher's fancier WordArt presets were arriving as text that Affinity then cut off at the frame edge. Those are now baked to outlines, so the banner arrives as the shape it looks like.
Pictures and text stack in the right order. In an IDML package, pictures and text frames are now interleaved in the document's real stacking order rather than emitted in separate batches, so a photo meant to sit behind a caption sits behind it. Picture frames also carry their own border and fill now. And a white box sitting on top of something else, which Publisher draws as white but which was hiding artwork underneath in the export, is dropped when it's covering rather than filling.
The earlier round of IDML work is in Word and InDesign exports catch up, if you want that list.
Every one of these was scored against Publisher's own output on real files, and shipped only when it won. If one of yours came out wrong in one of these ways, run it again.