Rutba Office 2.0: redaction and inspection in every editor, and a dark theme that reads

Rutba Office 2.0 came out on 15 October, the release after 1.51. The new number starts the count again; what is in it finishes work that 1.50 began. Documents gained Redact and Inspect Document in 1.50, and in 2.0 Presentations and Worksheets have them too, so every editor in the suite can take what should not travel out of a copy before it is sent.

Presentations

• Redact and Inspect Presentation. Review, Redact marks words on slides, in notes and comments, in alt text, and areas of pictures. Apply saves a copy with them taken out of every part of the file. File, Info, Check for Issues, Inspect Presentation finds comments (PowerPoint 365’s included), notes, personal information, properties, custom XML, invisible and off-slide objects, ink and embedded files, and removes them when asked.
• Ink kept as PowerPoint keeps it. Pen and highlighter strokes from the Draw tab are saved as PowerPoint saves ink, and ink drawn in PowerPoint opens.
• Draw on the slide show. Ctrl+P, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+E pick the pen, the highlighter and the eraser during a show, with a small bar for them, and leaving the show asks whether to keep the ink, as PowerPoint does.
• Comments as PowerPoint 365 keeps them. An @ and a name mentions that person, offered as you type. You can edit your own comment or reply in place, and Resolve and Reopen are saved with the deck.

Worksheets

• Inspect Workbook finds comments and notes, personal information, properties, custom XML, headers and footers, hidden sheets, rows, columns and names, and invisible content, and removes them when asked. A hidden sheet is exactly the sort of thing a workbook carries to a client without anybody meaning it to.
• Redact marks words and numbers, from a search, from email, telephone and card patterns or from a pattern of your own, and saves a copy with black bars in their place. The copy is read back from the disk to prove no part of the file still holds them.
• Cells stay readable in the dark theme. A cell keeps the fill the file gives it, as Excel does, and words in automatic colour take whichever ink reads on that fill.

A dark theme measured, not judged

The dark theme was checked by measuring the contrast of the words in every app at two window sizes, rather than by looking. Words in an app’s own colour are lifted where they were too dark to read, white words on coloured fills sit on a deeper fill, and the quietest grey is a step lighter. Mail adjusts a message’s own colours by the same rule as a workbook’s cells, so dark text on a dark page does not happen.

Find on a scan

After Recognise Text, PDF’s Find now marks the very word it found, at every zoom, on scanned and typed pages, in English, Urdu and Arabic. Before, the mark could sit a few pixels away from its word. Each recognised word is now a run of its own in the invisible text layer, with its box drawn in to its ink.

What was run before it went out

The gate ran 2,599 engine tests with none failing and 7 skipped where a package they need is not installed, all 12 editing checks, and 1,819 of 1,820 checks that drive the real windows. The one that failed records a talking head with the stand-in camera the checks use, and it passed when run again on its own. All 11 windows painted clean, and the fuzzers damaged 5,400 files and 1,800 PDFs without a single fault or hang.

2.0 is still a beta for Windows, offered to installed copies as an update like every 1.x release, and its builds are still not code-signed. The release candidate, code signing and a long-term line come later in the 2.x line.