Engine update: Word and InDesign exports catch up
Yesterday's post covered the PDF side. The same week of work reaches the Word and InDesign packages today. These are the fixes you see when you open the file in Word or place it in InDesign.
Backgrounds sit behind the text in Word. Page backgrounds, master page artwork and full page shapes were landing in the text layer, so a background rectangle could sit on top of the words and hide them. They now go behind the text, where Publisher puts them. Across our Word test set, losing files dropped from 471 to 270 in a week.
Rotated pictures keep their shape. A photo turned a quarter turn used to come out with its width and height swapped, so it arrived squashed or stretched. It now keeps its proportions, and WMF logos follow the same rule.
Line spacing and fonts read correctly in Word. Spacing now goes into the file as one native measurement instead of a stack of hints Word reads loosely. And when Word lacks a font, we name the family our engine actually resolved. Word ignores the "alternate name" hint other tools rely on, so we write the real family and Word picks the right substitute.
Word booklets keep their page count. Saddle stitched booklets were splitting into extra sheets Publisher never made. On a 24 file booklet set, sheet splits fell from 44 to 15 and page coverage rose. Chained text frames that ran backwards, sending the reader from page three to page two, now flow forward.
Logos and clip art come out sharp in IDML. WMF and EMF metafiles were drawn onto a fixed canvas of 816 by 1056 pixels whatever their real size, so small logos arrived soft and oversized. They now render at true size and stay inside their frame. On the test set, 30 oversized links went to zero. Image positions are written at full precision too, so a placed picture no longer creeps by fractions of a point.
The IDML export shares the text fixes too. Table cell padding, hyphenation and first line placement carry over from yesterday's work. See text that sits where Publisher puts it.
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.