Engine update: text that sits where Publisher puts it
Another week of engine work is live. The method never changes: we compare our output to Publisher's own output on real documents, and fix what differs. Here is what moved.
First lines now sit where Publisher seats them. We read font face measurements wrong for many common faces, Gill Sans MT and bold Times New Roman among them. A first line could start about a point high, and every line below inherited the error, so the drift grew down the page. Space above a paragraph at the top of a frame was off too. On the files we measured, that gap was typically out by 4.67 points. It is now out by 0.53.
Table cells hold their text the way Publisher does. The padding between a cell border and the text inside it was our guess, not Publisher's. Cells landing within half a point of Publisher went from under 2 in 100 to 89 in 100. Bullet symbols inside cells used to vanish; across 142 files, 765 of 780 bulleted cells now show them.
Lines break in the same places. Publisher gives itself an 18 point window at the right margin before it hyphenates a word. Our engine now uses the same window, so paragraphs wrap the way they wrap in Publisher.
Booklets and folded cards come out in order. The print setup stored in the file, saddle stitch booklet, folded card or plain page, is now read straight from the document. Pages arrive in the arrangement Publisher gives them.
Shapes stacked over white areas now layer correctly. A shape drawn on top of a white text body used to disappear or cover the wrong thing. 3D WordArt improved too: extruded sides get their real colors, gold and metallic and red walls included, the lettering hangs and turns like Publisher's, and texture fills keep their opacity.
Small fixes, real files. Hairline rules with no height now paint. A phantom Helvetica substitution is gone. Optima maps to Calibri, the same swap Publisher makes. PNGs with damaged metadata no longer stop a PDF finishing. Under the hood, the 90,000 line core of the parser was split into focused modules with one place to set every option, so fixes land faster and break less. A few hundred more files now land in our top fidelity band than a week ago.
Every fix was scored against Publisher's own output on thousands of real files, and shipped only when it won. If one of your files came out wrong in one of these ways, run it again.