A picture that floats on screen should float on paper too

There is a special disappointment reserved for documents: the moment a page that looked right on screen comes out of a printer looking wrong. It is worse than a visible bug, because it happens after the work is finished, usually in front of whoever the document is for.

Rutba Word had one of those. A picture anchored at the side of a paragraph has floated there since 1.11, with the words wrapping round it. Print it, or save it as a PDF, and the picture dropped to a block underneath — the same document, laid out twice, two different ways.

The page now lays the lines beside it

In 1.15 the paginator lays the lines short beside a floating picture, for as far down as the picture reaches and into the paragraphs after it, and the PDF writer draws the picture at its side. A picture that cannot fit in the space left on a page goes whole to the next page with its paragraph rather than being split or dropped.

Getting that right is the same argument as the ruler that moves things: layout decisions belong to one engine, and a second engine drawing its own version is how “on screen” and “on paper” drift apart.

Worksheets: links that go somewhere, notes that show

Two things a spreadsheet carries that a viewer usually drops came alive in the same release.

• Hyperlinks. A link in a cell is read with its target and drawn underlined. Ctrl+click follows it: an address opens outside the suite, a place in the workbook is gone to. Ctrl+K puts one on a cell — an address or a place — and offers to change or remove one that is already there. The file carries it the way Excel writes one, so it survives the trip back.
• Notes. A cell with a note wears its red corner and tells the note on hover, rather than hiding a comment somebody left for a reason.

Both matter more in files you did not write. A workbook arrives from a customer with links between sheets and notes explaining three of the figures; an editor that ignores both shows you a grid of numbers and loses the part that explains them — and then writes the file back without them, which is the failure that makes people distrust a free editor.

Help that opens a page that exists

Small, and overdue: every Help tab in the suite now opens a help page that is actually there, on office.rutba.io. And Get mail in Mail is F5, because that is the key everybody presses anyway.