Changelog

Version 2.3

Added

• Every font in the Font list now draws a sample of real text beside its name, set in the language of the frame you’re working in and shaped by the same engine that sets your page — so a Nastaliq face shows properly joined Nastaliq, and what the list shows is what you get. A second column shows how that face handles English, which is what usually decides whether you also need a separate Latin font — a blank column means the face has no usable Latin of its own. A face that can’t set your language falls back to showing its own script, rather than a row of empty boxes. Turn samples off in Tools → Options → Fonts if you have a very large font folder.
• Fourteen built-in keyboard layouts, not four. Every language you can set on a frame now types in its own script: Urdu (three layouts — the standard one, Phonetic Roman→Urdu, and the Windows standard), Persian (three), Arabic, Pashto (two), Sindhi, plus Punjabi/Shahmukhi, Saraiki and Balochi, and an English layout that forces Latin even when Windows itself is set to an Urdu keyboard. Nothing needs installing in Windows.
• The ⌨ keyboard button on the format bar is a switcher now, not just a toggle. It names the layout you’re actually typing with, and the arrow beside it lists every layout that frame’s language offers, so you can change it without leaving the page. Clicking the button (or Ctrl+Space) still flips between that layout and typing straight through the Windows keyboard.
• Araabs can be typed, not only clicked. Hold AltGr with a key for the marks that used to need the palette — khari zabar, ulta pesh, zer-e-izafat, maddah, hamza above and more. The Urdu, Pashto and Arabic Windows layouts additionally carry their own standard’s AltGr marks.

Fixed

• An Arabic or a Persian frame typed Urdu letters. Both languages fell through to the Urdu keyboard, so the letters those alphabets actually need couldn’t be typed at all. Each language now has its own layout and starts on it.

Changed

• Tools → Options: the “Urdu” tab is now “Keyboard Layouts”, since every right-to-left language has a row there, not only Urdu.
• Find & Replace’s “Urdu keyboard” checkbox is now “Frame’s keyboard”, since it types through whichever language the selected frame is in.

Version 2.2

Added

• Insert → Page Border Line… draws a ruled border around the whole page — how far in from the paper’s edge it sits, its width, colour, and whether it’s solid, dashed, dotted or a double rule. What it places is an ordinary rectangle you can restyle, move or delete afterwards. Solid/dashed/dotted/double is now a property of any shape’s border, not only a page border.
• Mirror border art on left-hand pages — an image can now be flipped horizontally on verso pages, so one decorative border serves both sides of a spread with its heavy edge to the outside.
• A new, smaller document format. Documents are considerably smaller (a sample document went from 11 KB to under 2 KB) and open and save quicker. Documents saved by older versions still open, and always will; a damaged document — an interrupted save, a copy that stopped, a sync client cut off mid-file — can now often be partially recovered as a new untitled document, leaving the original untouched.

Changed

• The format bar reports the formatting at the caret. Click into a word set in 48pt and the Font, Latin font and Size controls show what that word is, rather than the frame’s own defaults — it follows the caret into a Row Layout track and a table cell too. Size is now a dropdown as well as a typed value.
• One way to pick a colour in the shape and path panels. The rows of flat colour swatches under Fill, Border Color and Stroke Color are gone; the swatch button and hex box beside them open the same advanced picker everywhere else, which already carries the document’s named swatches with a tint slider.

Fixed

• In a multi-column frame you could only click into the first column. Clicking text in the second or third column put the caret on the same row of the first column instead. A click now lands where you aimed it, in English and Urdu frames alike.
• Things inside a multi-column frame were drawn in the wrong column. An inline table or image that flowed into the second or third column was painted on top of column 1 instead, uneditable there; a drop cap and a hyphenated line-ending had the same fault. All now sit in their own column, on screen and in every export.
• An interrupted save could destroy the document it was replacing on drives where the safe swap-in couldn’t happen (some OneDrive, network and virtual drives), falling back to an in-place overwrite that left nothing behind if it stopped halfway. Saving now always keeps the previous version until the new one is completely written.

Version 2.1

Added

• Text background — select some words and give them a background colour from the Properties panel’s Text Background swatch, a highlighter over the text itself.
• Paragraph background, from the panel’s Paragraph Background swatch: one clean fill behind the paragraph the caret is in, running either indent-to-indent (the full measure) or hugging just the text. In a Row Layout track, the paragraph background is the row background — shade the translation track and it reads as one continuous tint down the page.
• Both colours can be linked to a named colour swatch, and both can be carried by a named character or paragraph style. Both are saved with the document, undo normally, and appear in PDF/image exports as well as on screen.

Fixed

• Turning Row Layout on for an empty frame drew nothing at all until you typed. An untyped Row Layout frame now shows its empty row straight away.
• Text overflowed the row rule below it, and raising a font size never grew the row. Rows now always leave room for the letters they hold, in every script and at every size, and grow when you enlarge the type. Existing Row Layout documents will show taller rows than before — that’s the correction.

Version 2.0

Added

• Type straight into a table cell — click into any cell, inline or floating, and get a real caret in the real typeface (Nastaliq included): type, select, apply bold/italic/underline/strikethrough/font/size/colour/alignment to part of a cell, Tab/Shift+Tab or the arrow keys to move between cells, and Escape to step back out. Works the same on an Urdu (RTL) table as an English one.
• Floating (wrap) tables — Insert → Table (Wrap)… places a table that floats in a text frame with body text wrapping around it, exactly like a wrap image: drag its move handle to reposition, drag its resize handle to change its width, and it re-docks to whichever margin it lands nearest.
• Merge cells across a row from the Insert/Edit Table dialog (Merge/Unmerge buttons), and set an explicit row height, per-cell vertical alignment, column widths and cell backgrounds — all reachable from the dialog now, not only from an InPage import.
• Decorative page borders — Insert → Border Art… places a full-page ornamental image behind everything else, idiomatic to Urdu and Islamic publishing. If the art has a clear centre, PublishingDesk offers to set the page’s margins to match automatically. Insert it on a master page to repeat it across every page that master applies to.
• Pictures clipped to a shape — crop a photo to a circle, oval, arch, star or any other closed shape instead of always a rectangle (a new Arch shape joins the shape tool too). Add Contour Wrap and the surrounding text hugs the picture’s curve instead of pushing away in a straight-edged box. Anchor to Paragraph makes a wrap image travel with the copy it illustrates as you edit above it, instead of staying fixed while its paragraph moves on.
• Pages that appear and disappear as you type — with “Add and remove pages automatically as text grows” on (Page Setup, off by default), a page is added the moment text overflows and removed again if it’s empty and nothing was deliberately added to it.
• ⭐ Row Layout — verse with translation (Insert → Row Layout (Translation)…) — stack two or three independently-typed lines in every row: a Quranic verse above its tarjuma, a hadith above its translation, Persian poetry above an Urdu rendering. Each track keeps its own language, font, size, alignment and spell check; if a row won’t fit, every track breaks together across linked frames and pages, so the pairing can never drift apart.
• Named paragraph & character styles (Tools → Paragraph & Character Styles…) with a based-on chain — apply from the “¶ Style”/“A Style” combos in the format bar, and editing a style’s definition updates every paragraph or run using it immediately. Paragraphs (and styles) also gained Keep With Next, Keep Lines Together and minimum widow/orphan lines.
• Story Editor — a plain-text view of a frame’s whole story, independent of where the frames themselves break, with a live word/character count. Find & Replace gained a Regex option for pattern-based search, alongside the existing plain search.
• Underline and strikethrough join bold and italic as a B / I / U / S row on the format bar and properties panel — the four buttons now show the real state of the text under the caret, and underline/strikethrough can combine with each other and with the box/pattern/reverse fills.
• Araab (diacritic) palette — a button for each of the 21 marks PublishingDesk knows (zabar, zer, pesh, tashdeed, jazm, the rarer marks, and honorifics including ﷺ), since most of them can’t be typed on an ordinary keyboard at all.
• Hyphenation for English (Edit → Paragraph… → “Break words across lines”) — splits long words at proper hyphenation points so narrow columns justify evenly, off by default and never more than two hyphens in a row.
• Drop caps (Edit → Paragraph… → Drop Cap (Lines)) — the classic magazine lede treatment, sized so its top lines up with the first line’s capitals and its baseline sits exactly on the last line it spans.
• Text wrap around an image (Insert → Wrap Image…), optical margin alignment (hanging punctuation for a cleaner justified edge), facing pages / spreads with inside/outside margins that mirror between left and right pages, document-wide layers so a master’s furniture can sit above or below page content, and named colour swatches with tints that every colour picker in the app now draws from.
• Inline images that sit inside a text flow and move with it, a new left-side tool palette (Image/Text/Shape, each a flyout with its variants) and Navigator panel for jumping straight to any page or frame, baseline-grid snap, first-baseline offset, vertical justify, balanced columns and column span for finer typographic control, and multi-script spell check covering Urdu, Arabic and Persian alongside English.
• Tools → Install Fonts… replaces the old manual copy-and-restart: pick one or more .ttf/.otf files and they’re available in the Font pickers immediately.
• Link two existing text frames by clicking one’s out-port marker, with visible in/out port arrows on every threaded frame, a Story Chain properties card (position in the chain, Prev/Next Frame, Move Earlier/Later), and View → Show Text Threads to see the whole chain at once.

Changed

• English and Urdu are now one kind of text frame. Everything the Urdu frame could do — threading, columns, paragraph styles, bullets, tab leaders, inline tables, frame borders — an English frame can do too, and a frame’s language can be switched either way without recreating it. Documents saved before this change keep their formatting exactly, converted into the new model the first time they’re opened.
• The Urdu dictionary was rebuilt from scratch, replacing a frozen 2009 word list whose affix rules had all been silently disabled — so a correctly spelled plural could flag as wrong. The new one adds modern vocabulary, handles ZWNJ-joined compounds correctly (so Urdu/Persian words like “صورتۿحال” stop being flagged), and persists words you add to the dictionary.
• Colour pickers redesigned — the old row of flat swatches is replaced everywhere by a single swatch + hex box opening an advanced picker (saturation/value plate, hue strip, R/G/B/A sliders, hex entry, recently-used colours).
• Placing a new text/shape object no longer drops it at a fixed spot — click to place at the default size, or drag to size it yourself as you place it.
• New Urdu text frames start at a more natural size (16pt / 0.85 line spacing, down from an oversized 28pt / 1.00), and a complex-script frame’s border can now be solid, dashed or dotted.

Fixed

• Editing a table cell and saving could overwrite the whole frame’s text, taking every table in that frame with it — on reopening, the frame held only that one cell’s worth of text. This affected any document whose tables were edited on the canvas (the in-canvas editing feature above); tables edited only through the Insert/Edit Table dialog were never affected. If you edited tables in-canvas since this release began rolling out and a document looks like it lost a table, please get in touch.
• Pressing Escape in an Urdu, Pashto or Sindhi frame no longer types an invisible character into the document (English frames were never affected).
• An Urdu table’s cell text no longer sits too low with the row’s border cutting through it, and an inline table’s top border no longer clips the line of text above it.
• The caret and selection highlight now cover the letters they belong to, instead of sitting too high and cutting across the middle — most visible in a table cell or in tightly-spaced Nastaliq text.
• Undo in Row Layout no longer jumps you to the other track, which used to make an earlier edit look impossible to undo. Which track you had selected is also remembered when you save and reopen a document.
• Selecting a text frame could silently overwrite its font the first time the format bar attached to it in a session — found while merging the English/Urdu frame types, and it mattered more with that change since a converted document could have lost the font it converted with.
• A paragraph continuing into the next frame of a threaded story is no longer re-indented as if it were new (only showed up when linked frames had different widths), and Urdu (RTL) paragraph indents now move the correct edge — a “left indent” on an Urdu paragraph was pulling in the far edge instead of the near one.
• Typing in a long Urdu/Nastaliq document is dramatically faster — text shaping is now memoized instead of reshaping the whole story on every keystroke, measured 13–38× faster per keystroke and larger on longer documents.

Version 1.2

Added

• Open InDesign (.idml) documents — File → Open (or File → Import → InDesign) reads the .idml files InDesign exports, and the ones commercial template packs ship alongside their .indd. Every page of every spread arrives with its size, margins, columns and ruler guides; master spreads become master pages (a facing master splits into an L and an R); text frames keep their position, size, rotation, columns, fill and stroke; threaded stories flow from frame to frame in the order InDesign linked them; paragraph and character styles are flattened onto the text (size, weight, italic, colour, tracking, baseline shift, underline, alignment, indents, spacing, leading, tab stops, bullets and numbering); and tables, rectangles, ovals, polygons, curved frames, lines, swatch colours (CMYK, RGB and Lab, with gradients and tints flattened to a solid) and placed images — cropped by their frame the way InDesign crops them — all come across. Import is one-way, exactly as for InPage: the result opens untitled, so Save can never overwrite your original.
• Fonts packaged with a document are loaded automatically. If a Document fonts folder sits beside the .idml, those faces are registered when you open it — so the layout is set in the designer’s own typefaces instead of a substitute, and lines break where they were meant to.

Changed

• One tidy Import menu. File → Import is now a single submenu holding InPage and InDesign at the top, with Text, Autoflow and SVG below, instead of three loose entries scattered through the File menu.
• Documents saved by earlier versions open exactly as before — the .pubdesk format is unchanged and nothing in an existing file is lost or reinterpreted.

Fixed

• An imported vector shape can be recoloured. Selecting a shape brought in from an SVG used to show an empty properties pane — no fill, no stroke, no error. It now gets a full appearance card (object style, fill, stroke colour and stroke thickness), and setting a stroke on a shape that arrived without one gives it a hairline so the change is visible.
• Text no longer clips at the bottom of an imported frame. A frame that came from a design file keeps its own text inset rather than the one PublishingDesk uses for frames you draw — InDesign sizes frames snugly around their text, so the extra padding pushed the last line out of nearly every box and re-broke every paragraph. Frames you drew yourself are unaffected.
• Headings no longer run into the paragraph after them, line spacing set to auto is now worked out per paragraph rather than once per style run, and a paragraph style whose definition names itself slightly differently from the text that applies it still resolves — a missed match used to lose every size, weight and indent the style carried.
• A family is now represented in the font list by its regular weight — a family whose bold file won the pick could set a whole imported document in bold and rewrap every line.
• Objects stack in the order the original author left them (pages were being buried under their own background), two master pages can no longer share a name and quietly collapse into one, and a table’s cells no longer land transposed or empty.

Version 1.1

Added

• Open your InPage (.inp) documents — File → Open (or Import InPage Document) reads an InPage file as a real, editable layout, not a flat picture. Pages, master pages, every frame’s position, size, rotation, columns, border and background come across; linked text still flows box to box; per-word formatting, paragraph settings and tab stops, tables (with merged cells and column widths), pictures, rules and ruler guides all arrive. Import is one-way — the result opens untitled, so Save can never overwrite your original. Files from InPage 2.21 through 2024 are supported.
• Tables — now visible and editable. A new Table menu inserts, edits and deletes a table at the cursor: cell fills, cell text, per-cell borders (including dashed and dotted), column widths and merged cells, drawn identically on screen and in every export.
• Bulleted and numbered lists — set a list and level on a paragraph; numbering counts per level and nests, and numbers use Urdu digits (۱، ۲، ۳) in a right-to-left paragraph. Bullets fall back to drawn discs, rings and squares when a Nastaliq face has no bullet glyph.
• Ruler guides you can place, move and snap to — drag out of the top or left ruler to drop a guide, drag it to move it or off the page to remove it, and objects snap to it. Guides never print or export.
• A Character dialog — decoration (underline, double underline, overline, box, pattern, reverse), letter-spacing, horizontal scale and baseline shift, scoped to the selection or the whole frame; tab stops are now editable in the Paragraph dialog.

Changed

• Sharper printing. Pages now print at the printer’s own resolution instead of a fixed low one, so fine Nastaliq hairlines and thin rules stay crisp — and a printed page no longer looks worse than the PDF export.
• The free-tier badge is redrawn with a light halo so it reads on dark and full-bleed designs instead of sitting on a white box, and it stays easy to delete from a vector PDF.

Fixed

• Colouring or bolding part of an Urdu word no longer breaks its cursive join. Styling half of a joined word used to split it into disconnected pieces; the word is now shaped as a whole and its glyphs divided for drawing, so the letters stay joined — on screen, in every export, and on justified lines.
• A paying customer no longer loses Pro when the Store can’t be reached — the entitlement is remembered, so launching offline keeps your unlocked features and watermark-free export.
• A complex-script frame’s background and border now reach every export (they were previously drawn on screen but dropped from PDF/PNG/SVG/print), and text decorations, horizontal scale and baseline shift are now actually drawn everywhere.
• .pubdesk and .inp documents open by double-clicking them in Explorer, and undoing a Paragraph change now takes a single press.

Version 1.0

Added

• Complex-script (Urdu/Persian/Pashto/Arabic) text — proper Nastaliq shaping with a per-frame language profile and a built-in Urdu keyboard (standard, phonetic Roman→Urdu, or system), with in-place editing and an accurate caret.
• Kashida (kasheeda) justification — justified Urdu/Arabic lines elongate the script’s connecting strokes (tatweel) instead of opening word gaps, on fonts with a real tatweel glyph.
• New-document template gallery — Paper (A-series + US), Social Media, Print and Custom, each with an aspect-accurate preview and a Landscape toggle.
• Multi-page documents & a Pages strip — add / duplicate / delete / reorder / navigate pages, with per-page size, orientation, margins, columns and baseline guides, plus one-click page numbering across all pages.
• Master pages — design repeating headers/footers/page-numbers/borders once and apply any master to the pages you choose, with master chips in the pages strip and an applied-master badge on each thumbnail.
• Layers — text, complex-script text, shapes and images, with a Layers panel (lock, show/hide, drag-to-reorder) and full z-order control.
• Direct manipulation — drag to move, rotation-aware resize handles, an on-canvas rotate handle (Shift snaps to 15°), marquee and multi-select, smart guides & snapping, grid, rulers (px/mm/cm/in), and align & distribute.
• Composable text effects — stackable outline / glow / shadow / inner-shadow / bevel / fill (solid, gradient, chrome) on English and Urdu frames, with a live preset gallery and save-your-own presets.
• Per-layer opacity — an opacity slider on every layer, applied on canvas and in all exports, and remembered with the document.
• Importing — import text into a frame, autoflow long text across as many pages as it needs (threading it through page copies that keep their border/graphics), and import SVG as editable vector shapes.
• Find & Replace across all text frames — Urdu and English, with an in-app Urdu keyboard toggle to find embedded English; matches highlight in their frames.
• Save / Open — a self-contained .pubdesk file (images embedded), with coalesced undo/redo, autosave and crash recovery.
• Export & print — PNG and vector PDF (Urdu preserved as crisp outlines), SVG and print-ready PDF with bleed + crop marks, a Preflight check, and printing of the current page or a range.
• Bring-your-own fonts — a curated set of free Nastaliq/Arabic fonts plus any .ttf/.otf you drop into the user fonts folder (opened from Help), auto-categorised by the scripts they support.
• Properties UX — every numeric field is a unit-aware spinner (steppers, mouse-wheel, arrow nudge, Enter commits), grouped into collapsible, remembered property cards.
• Quality of life — keyboard shortcuts, recent files, per-document zoom, remembered window placement, and an About window showing the version and an auto-incrementing build number.

Free & Pro

• Freemium model — the whole designer is free, with PNG/PDF export carrying a small watermark.
• A one-time Pro upgrade removes the watermark and unlocks PDF for Print (bleed + crop marks), SVG export and Preflight. Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription.

Changed

• A custom icon toolbar with hover states and tooltips, plus matching menu icons, and a contextual format bar that adapts to the selected English or Urdu frame.
• Dark theme softened to a neutral medium-grey (no blue cast); Light remains the default.
• The bundled font set is now redistributable-only (Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Gulzar, Amiri, Scheherazade New, Noto Naskh Arabic, Lateef, Markazi Text, Estedad, Vazirmatn); add your own for anything else.

Fixed

• Autoflow no longer renders blank pages — text now flows correctly onto page 2 and beyond, and any threaded multi-frame layout fills as expected.
• SVG import no longer shows a giant black box — definition/metadata elements are skipped on import.
• Find & Replace no longer crashes on open; the top-bar font/size now apply to a selected English frame; locked layers are fully locked; and page thumbnails number pages 2+ correctly.

Version 0.1.0

Initial Foundation

• A runnable tabbed multi-document editor — each document its own page; open and close documents as tabs.
• Image, text and shape layers from a common base, with direct manipulation on the canvas: drag to move, eight resize handles, click to select, and double-click a text frame to type in place.
• Z-order controls (To Front / Forward / Backward / To Back), a Layers panel, and a Properties panel with per-type editors and a rotation control.