Rutba Office 1.43: a video editor with a timeline, and pages side by side

Rutba Office 1.43, published on 12 October, turns Video into an editor with a timeline. The same release reworks Image and Pictures, and gives Documents something Word users reach for without thinking: two or more pages side by side.

Video: an editor on a timeline

Clips, still pictures and sound go end to end on lanes that show their frames and their waveforms. You split at the playhead with S (Shift+S splits every lane at once), trim with I and O or by dragging either end, and close gaps or delete with the rest of the edit moving up to meet it. Clips snap to each other, to markers and to the beats of a song as you drag them between lanes. J, K and L shuttle through the timeline, with undo and redo throughout.

• Per clip: fit, fill or a blurred fill for a picture of another shape, quarter turns, flips and crop, with volume, mute and fades.
• Transitions: crossfade, dip to black, wipe, slide, push and zoom between clips.
• Titles: titles, lower thirds, end cards and callouts on their own tracks, brought in with a fade, a rise, typing on, or a pop.
• Export with sound to MP4 or WebM, the whole project or only a marked section, in landscape, square or vertical frames for the screen it is going to.
• Projects are saved as .rvid files, and their media is found again when it has moved. Unsaved work can be recovered from the launcher.

Image: quick edits and tone

Image gains the edits most people open a photo editor for. Flip, resize by pixels or percentage, invert, and straighten by an angle while keeping the largest upright rectangle. Arrows, boxes, circles, pen strokes and text can be drawn on a picture and stay editable until you press Done. The tone tools cover auto enhance, levels, curves, white balance, exposure, highlights and shadows, with sharpen, noise reduction, vignette and red eye. All of that pixel work runs away from the window, so it keeps answering. Export lets you choose JPEG or WebP quality, cap the size or the longest side, and keep or strip the metadata.

Pictures: a whole folder at once

Batch edit works on the pictures in a folder: resize them by a percentage, to fit a box or by the longest side, convert them to PNG, JPEG or WebP, rename them by a pattern of name, number, date and size, turn them upright by their camera orientation, and keep or strip their metadata. The results go beside the originals or into a folder you choose, and a file already there is never replaced without asking.

Documents: pages side by side

Documents now lays its pages across the window when there is room, as Word does. At half size two or three pages stand side by side, and at 30% six or more, the rows wrapping and centred. A right-to-left document lays them from the right. View → Multiple Pages picks the zoom that shows two whole pages, and One Page shows one. Side to Side puts every page in a single row at a whole page’s height, and the mouse wheel turns them sideways a page at a time, like a book.

Clicking any page puts the caret there, and typing at the foot of the left page carries on at the top of the right one. 1.43 also fixed a paragraph split across two pages that could jump back and forth after an edit until the layout gave up, leaving the pages after it overlapping. It now settles at once.

Zoom with Ctrl and the wheel, everywhere

Ctrl and the mouse wheel zoom the page in Documents, the grid in Worksheets, the slide in Presentations and the message in Mail, ten per cent a notch, keeping the point under the pointer where it was, as Word, Excel and PowerPoint do. Ctrl+Plus, Ctrl+Minus and Ctrl+0 step it and put it back, and a touchpad pinch zooms smoothly. It is always the app’s own zoom, so the ribbon and panes keep their size.

As with every release, 1.43 was put through 5,400 deliberately damaged files, the old Office formats among them, and none of them faulted. The window checks drive each new feature with real input, down to building two clips and a still, editing them, exporting, and reading the finished file back for its length and tracks.