Rutba Office 1.35 to 1.38: the whole suite in Urdu, and no window waiting on another

On the same day as 1.30 to 1.34, four more releases of Rutba Office went out. The largest change is one that a person who reads Urdu sees before they open a file: the whole suite can now speak it.

Rutba Office in Urdu

The app menu has a Language section offering English, اردو, or the system’s own language. Every word the windows show now goes through one message catalogue, nearly 4,900 phrases: the ribbons and their tooltips, the menus, dialogs and panes, the status bars and the messages a window gives you.

• The frame turns right to left. The ribbon reads from the right, panes and dialogs follow it, and the window buttons move to the left of the title bar, where Windows puts them for a right-to-left language.
• Your document keeps its own direction. A page, a worksheet’s grid and formula bar, and a slide’s stage stay as the document has them, so typing and editing work as they did, in English or in Urdu.
• Dates and numbers follow the language: the calendar’s days and months, the dates in lists, and counts by Urdu’s own plural rules.
• The language is kept per window, as Office keeps it. Windows opened after you choose open in it, and every window does after the next start.

The same work changed a little of the English too. A count of one now reads in the singular (“1 shape”, not “1 shapes”), and a count of a thousand or more has its comma.

No window waiting on another

Until 1.37, the work on every document, workbook and deck happened in the one process all the windows share, apart from reading and unzipping a file, which 1.30 had already moved out. A long document laid out for print, or a large workbook recalculating, could make Mail and the launcher wait. Now all of that work happens on a thread of its own, and the shared process only passes requests in and answers out. A new check shows another window’s request answered in about a millisecond while a 240-page document is laid out for print.

If that thread ever stops, it is started again. The documents it held are closed, their windows say so in a sentence, and the launcher offers back each one’s unsaved work up to its last half-minute copy. 1.35 had already moved the compression part of saving off the shared process, so saving a large workbook no longer holds the other windows, and an edit made during a save is kept for the next one.

Lists of your own in Documents

Home → Multilevel List → Define New Multilevel List (1.36) builds a list a level at a time: the number style, the number’s own words with the levels above drawn in (Chapter %1., then %1.%2), where it starts, where the number and the text sit, and legal numbering. A preview numbers each level as you set it. A level can be linked to a heading style, so every Heading 1 reads Chapter I., II. and every Heading 2 reads 1.1, 1.2, the way Word links headings to a list. Files whose styles carry a list are now numbered when they open.

WordArt also caught up. All thirty-six of Office’s warps are now drawn, in Documents, Worksheets and Presentations, and since 1.36 a WordArt under Transform prints and goes into the PDF along its path, as it shows on the page. It used to print straight.

Worksheets: two more query steps and fuller scripts

• Pivot Column (1.35) turns each value of a column into a column of its own, filled with another column’s values summed, counted, averaged, at their least or most, or left as they are.
• Conditional Column adds a column whose value is what the first matching condition gives, such as “if Region equals East then Home”, with an otherwise value.
• Scripts can do more: set a column’s width and a row’s height in points, autofit columns, merge and unmerge cells, strike text through and align it top, middle or bottom. Record Actions writes lines for all of those. Setting widths and heights used to be refused when a script ran, though the calls were offered.

Two fixes worth knowing about

• Calendar and Contacts sync. An event or a card made while a sync was sending to your CalDAV or CardDAV server was never sent, because the sync cleared its whole queue when it finished. It now stays queued for the next sync, and pressing Sync during a sync runs it once more afterwards.
• A slide show keeps every press. A click or a key pressed just as the next slide arrived was lost, which could stop a looping show at its last slide. The press is now carried out when the slide is there.

Each of the four releases was again put through the fuzzer that damages 5,400 files, the old formats among them, and none of them faulted. A new set of window checks opens Documents, Worksheets and Presentations in Urdu, types Urdu onto the page, and fails if any word in a window has been left outside the catalogue.