Text that fits its box
Publisher has a setting most people never turn on deliberately. It's called "shrink text on overflow", and the templates switch it on for you. When a headline or a caption runs longer than its frame, Publisher drops the point size a notch at a time until the words fit.
You never see it happen. You just see text that fits.
Until now our converter didn't do it. We laid the text out at the size stored in the file, and if that was too much text for the box, it spilled past the edge or got cut off at the bottom. On a flyer with a tight headline box, that's the difference between a finished page and an obviously broken one.
Now it fits the way Publisher fits it
Shrink text on overflow is on by default as of this release.
Before shipping it we compared our output against Publisher's own output. Frames that were already right stayed right, which is the thing we watch hardest, because a fix that breaks working pages isn't a fix.
The one that didn't work
Publisher's setting runs both ways. Text can shrink to fit a small box, and it can grow to fill a large one. We built the grow half too, and it's still switched off.
Our own estimate said it would help. Then we rendered real pages, compared them against Publisher, and it didn't. So we retracted the estimate and left the arm off. We shipped the shrink half only. We'd rather tell you that than ship both and let you find out.
There's a related thing we got wrong on the way, and it's worth saying plainly: we spent a while hunting for a missing "grow" behavior when the real defect in our output was over-shrinking, text coming out smaller than Publisher sets it. Chasing the wrong direction cost us most of a week.
Line breaks, continued
Why lines break where they do covered the mechanics. That work didn't stop, so here's the short version of what moved since.
Two more waves of hyphenation rules landed, both drawn from watching where Publisher itself puts a hyphen rather than from a standard algorithm.
Web addresses got their own rule. This one surprised us: Publisher will hyphenate the local part of an email address, the piece before the @, but it refuses to break the pieces of a real URL. Those are opposite behaviors and we had to test both against real documents to believe it.
French text got its own pass as well, since the spacing and break rules there aren't the English ones.
If a headline overflowed its box or a paragraph wrapped wrong in your file, run it again. The preview is free, so you can see the result on your own file before you pay, and conversions are unlimited for a one time $49.