The ruler in Rutba Word now moves things

The fastest way to tell a real word processor from a text box with a toolbar is to look above the page. A ruler that only shows where the margins are is decoration. A ruler you can take hold of — drag a paragraph’s hanging indent, put a tab stop exactly where a column of figures should line up — is how people who format documents for a living actually format them.

Three releases of Rutba Office in a week turned Rutba Word into the second kind.

Pages, as you type (1.10)

Rutba Word — the app took that name in 1.10 — lays the document out on pages while you type, rather than as one long scroll that only becomes pages when printed. Paragraphs split across a page at a line, tables at a row, and a heading stays on the same page as what follows it. A manual page break starts a fresh page. The status bar says which page you are on, of how many, and headers and footers sit on every page.

That matters more than it sounds, because a page is where most formatting disagreements show up. A document that looks right as a scroll and breaks a table across two pages in the recipient’s copy of Word is a document that looked right to one person.

Pictures that float, and words that wrap (1.11)

A picture anchored at the side of the page now floats there, and the words wrap round it. Wrap Text and Position live on the Layout tab, and corner handles resize it. The picture’s wrap and position are saved into the file, so they survive the trip to somebody else’s machine.

A ruler that moves things (1.12)

The ruler above the page now takes hold of:

• A paragraph’s indents — first-line, hanging, left and right.
• Tab stops — click the ruler to add one, drag to move it, drag it off the ruler to remove it.
• The page margins — drag the margin edge.
• A table’s columns — with the caret in a table, the ruler shows its columns and they can be dragged.

While you drag, a dashed guide runs down the page so you can line the marker up with something that is already there. The document is written when you let go — one change per drag, not a stream of them.

Tables drawn from the file’s own grid

A table is now drawn from the grid stored in the file: each column at the width its author gave it, merged cells spanning, rows at the height they were set to. Grips sit on its borders. Drag a column border and the two columns either side of it change while the table keeps its width; drag the bottom of a row and you set that row’s height. Both are written the way Word writes them, which is the only way they survive being opened in Word.

Checked the way a person would check it

Each of those behaviours is a check the release has to pass, run against the application itself rather than against its code: the ruler shows a paragraph’s first-line indent where the file puts it, and its tab stops where the file puts them; a click adds a tab stop where it was clicked; a tab stop dragged off the ruler is removed; dragging the margin edge moves the page margin; dragging a column border keeps the table’s width; and the changes are saved. The page layout has checks of its own — every block of a long document sits inside a page, a page break heads a fresh page, the status bar counts the pages.

And the engine underneath is held to files Microsoft Office actually wrote, for the reasons in we test against files Office actually wrote. A ruler that moves an indent is only useful if the indent it writes is one Word reads back.