Rutba Word caught up on the page: footnotes, borders, watermarks and scans

Between 1.16 on 20 September and 1.25 on 21 September, Rutba Office published eleven releases. Every one of them is on the release timeline with the notes written the day it went out. This post gathers what they did to Rutba Word — and nearly all of it is about the page: what sits at its foot, what goes round and behind it, and what happens when a scanner fills it.

Footnotes at the foot of their page

A footnote now goes to the foot of the page its reference lands on — under the body, above the bottom margin, under a short rule — on screen as it already did in print. The notes used to gather at the end of the document on screen, which is correct for endnotes and wrong for everything else. A paragraph split across two pages keeps each note with the line that points at it.

A sheet of scanned cards prints as it looks

This one came from a real document. A scanner writes its scans into one paragraph — four cards, two to a line — and Rutba Word only split a paragraph where a line of words began, so the second line of cards was drawn across the gap between two pages. Now a paragraph of pictures splits between its picture lines, pictures in a paragraph of their own sit side by side as Word draws them, and a sheet of four cards prints two by two rather than one under another.

A picture never crosses a sheet’s edge either. One taller than the page — a card scanned in portrait at the column’s width — is drawn to fit, its proportions kept, on screen and in print. And a picture inserted from the file dialog is now written into the document whole; it used to be written as the digits of its bytes and draw as nothing, which is the kind of bug only a real file finds.

Round the page, and behind the words

• Page borders draw a box round every page.
• A watermark writes DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL or your own words behind the text, the way Word writes its own.
• Line numbers go down the margin — continuous, restarting on each page, or every fifth line.
• A page colour sits behind every page, and a paragraph can carry its own shading and borders.
• A floating text box — a pull quote, a sidebar — prints beside the words, the lines next to it laid out shorter, as it already showed on screen.

The first three were on the ribbon and greyed out. All of them are now written into the file the way Word keeps them — so they survive being sent to somebody who opens it in Word — and printed by the PDF writer, which is where a watermark actually has to appear.

Lists that nest, and paragraphs that sort

Home → Multilevel list numbers 1., 1.1., 1.1.1., and the indent buttons move a list paragraph a level, so a numbered list nests 1. a. i. as Word’s does. Home → Sort puts the selected paragraphs A to Z or Z to A — numbers in their order, capitals set aside — each paragraph moving whole with its look, or the whole document when nothing is selected.