WordArt gets its depth back
A while back we wrote about the hard parts of Publisher files, and WordArt led the list. We could bend text along an arch or all the way around a circle. What we could not do was the third dimension.
Publisher's 3D WordArt is not just colored letters. It is a slab. The face of each letter points at you, the extruded sides run back into the page, and the sides are often a different color than the face. Gold letters with brick colored walls. Metallic letters with darker metal sides. White lettering with orange walls. Drop those sides and a headline that was carved out of the page prints as flat text.
What changed
The sides are painted now, in their real colors. Red faces with orange walls, red with peach, gold with brick: the engine reads the color pair out of the file instead of guessing one.
The lettering also turns and hangs the way Publisher's presets do. Several of those presets tilt the block of text and let it drop below the baseline, which is most of what makes a slab headline look like a slab. That rotation and that hang now match.
Two more things came with it. Shadow lighting on grouped 3D shapes follows Publisher, so a set of WordArt pieces treated as one object shades as one object. And texture fills keep their opacity, so a washed back marble or paper texture stays washed back instead of going solid.
Finally, WordArt sitting inside a text frame lands in the right place. It used to drift out of its box.
What it looks like
One file in our library leads with a maroon 3D slab headline across the top of a flyer. It used to come out as flat maroon lettering: readable, but the poster had turned into a memo. Now the sides are there, the block tilts, and the headline reads as the same headline.
If a headline in your file came out flat, run it again.