Engine update: bring your own fonts, older files fixed, WordArt renders
Five days of engine work went live on 8 September. This is the whole list, grouped by what you'll actually notice.
Bring your own fonts
You can now upload fonts with your conversion. Add a zip of font files, or a zipped InDesign package, and we read the fonts out of it and use them for that one job. They're deleted with the job when it's done.
Every conversion also comes with a font report. It lists which font families your file asked for, which ones we found, and what we used instead for any we didn't. If a heading looks different from what you expected, the report tells you why.
Recognition also improved again this week, in the same way we wrote about a few days ago. Our converter identifies more of the faces real Publisher documents ask for, and when a face still can't be resolved it now falls back on open-licensed designs that carry the same character widths and line heights. Lines break in the same place, so the page keeps its shape.
Older Publisher files
If your file was built in Publisher 97 or Publisher 2000, several long-standing problems are fixed. Linked text boxes now keep their text in the right box. Table cells split the way they should instead of running together. Line spacing follows the size you actually set, not a default. Page-number fields and "Continued on page" notices now show up. Master-page text alignment is read from the file; before this, it defaulted to left no matter what the file said. And text no longer shrinks in places where Publisher itself would have left it at full size.
WordArt
More WordArt shapes render now: arch up, arch down, wave, cascade, inflate, deflate, and curve down. Arched text inside a grouped piece of WordArt also gets its curve right, so a badge or logo with text wrapped around it keeps the correct radius instead of a rough approximation.
Grouped objects
Shapes inside a group used to lose some of their own styling. Drop shadows, glows, and vertical text alignment are now kept on grouped shapes. We had already read this information out of your file; we just weren't using it. Now we do.
Clip art and metafiles
A batch of fixes for older clip art and embedded metafiles: watermark images wash out the way Publisher washes them, white plates inside clip art recolor to the fill color you set, cream-colored backgrounds no longer get clipped as if they were paper, and a lilac plate that shows up in some old Office clip art is now keyed out correctly.
Text layout
Justified text follows Publisher's own justify setting rather than one generic version. When a text frame doesn't carry its own margins, we now fall back to the same default margins Publisher uses. A word too wide for its frame gets cut at the frame edge, in the same place Publisher cuts it. And a tab that lands past the right margin now wraps the next word onto the following line, matching Publisher's behavior.
One of these changes, the frame-edge cut, had a side effect: it shifted text on a small number of files in our own testing, through an unrelated measuring step in our process. We found it, fixed the measuring step, and shipped the fix in this same release. We're still re-checking the result and will report back if anything more turns up.
Word documents
Right-to-left text now works for Hebrew and Arabic. Where Publisher hyphenates a word, the Word file gets an explicit soft hyphen at the same point. Word's default tab stop now matches Publisher's. Arrowheads land on the correct end of the line and at the correct size. Line ends use rounded caps where Publisher uses them. "At least" line spacing is preserved instead of being flattened to an exact value. WordArt is hosted so Word actually applies its warp instead of showing flat text. Designs with several copies per sheet, like labels or tickets, come through correctly. And font names in the file are your original fonts, not our substitutes, so opening the file elsewhere shows what was actually used.
InDesign and Affinity files
Line spacing now matches how InDesign itself measures a baseline. On our 897-file InDesign test set, page-count mismatches dropped from 545 to 36. Placed images now declare their bounds, so InDesign applies rotation and scaling correctly instead of ignoring it. Clip art that your document stores as vector art is now placed as vector art, where before it arrived as a flat picture: it stays sharp at any size, and any text inside it is still text. A picture your document mirrors is mirrored, which this export had never done. Font resources carry real PostScript names. Oval, rounded, and callout text frames keep their actual shape instead of being flattened to a rectangle. Dashed and dotted strokes keep their pattern. Lines get their arrowheads. And lines inside a group stay lines instead of turning into something else.
Still holding from last week
The booklet fix from our last post is still in place: booklets converting to Word keep their text in the right panels. If you haven't converted a booklet since 3 September, you're already on the fixed version.
That's the release. If one of your files came out wrong in any of these ways before, run it again. The preview is free, and downloads are a one-time $49 purchase.