The pictures that vanished, and the lines that went with them
The worst conversion defect isn't an ugly page. It's an empty spot where something used to be. You can't always tell what's missing, but the person who made the file can. This week's update brings back three kinds of missing things.
Publisher 2000 pictures
Files made in the oldest versions of Publisher store some pictures with a crop recipe the engine misread. The result: the picture simply didn't render. A watermark behind the page, a logo in the corner, sometimes the whole background image. A couple of hundred documents in our test library had this defect, and in a few of them the missing picture was most of the page. Those pictures render now.
Related fix: a large cropped picture used as a page background could come out rotated a quarter turn. It comes out upright.
Default lines
Draw a line in Publisher, change nothing about it, and Publisher gives it a default style. The engine used to lose exactly those lines: dividers, rules under headings, the borders around a coupon. They draw now, and in their real color. A cyan divider comes back cyan, not black, and not blank.
The three-degree tilt
Designers tilt things a little. A photo rotated three degrees to look casual, a "SALE!" burst turned slightly off-axis. The engine used to straighten any rotation under ten degrees to zero, which quietly killed the effect. Nearly nine hundred shapes across the test library were affected. Now a three-degree tilt is a three-degree tilt, in PDF, Word, and IDML.
That closes out this week's update. The full list of changes is in the announcement post, and the calendar and font-size stories got their own posts too. If an old file of yours ever came back with a hole in it, feed it through again. We may already have found your bug.