What's new

Release notes.

A short, honest log of what's shipped. Ask a question if you want more detail on any item.

2026-09-05

Edit menus on your phone, and languages that go live with a switch

  • The full editor now works on a phone: select and move elements, pinch to zoom, edit text, add and remove dishes, sections, and images, switch pages, undo and redo, change the theme, and publish
  • On a phone the editor hides the app's sidebar and header, keeps Back, Undo, Redo, Share, Save, and Publish in reach, and tucks everything else into a More menu
  • Tap an element and its properties slide up in a sheet over the lower half of the screen, with the canvas scrolling to keep the element in view; drag the sheet up for the full panel or down to close it
  • Turn the phone sideways and the editor asks you to rotate it back; your work is waiting when you do
  • Every dialog reachable from the editor fits a phone screen; tablet and desktop editing are unchanged
  • The Active switch on a language now makes it live: on a published menu it asks you to confirm, then the language appears on or disappears from your live menu right away. The separate publish button for translations is gone
  • On a menu that is not published yet, the translations pages say so and offer Publish in place
  • The translations pages gained breadcrumbs, with the menu name linking back to the editor
  • A menu's pages now stay on one text size: adding a page with AI, importing a spreadsheet, or applying Polish suggestions no longer leaves a page at a different size or shrinks the whole menu a notch each time
  • Click a completed step in the menu wizard's step rail to go back to it
  • The offline notice no longer flashes when your computer wakes from sleep
  • Closing an upload panel while its image editor was still open no longer crashes the page
  • A round of polish on the translations pages
2026-09-03

Restyle with AI now picks the background, and a frame thickness slider

  • An AI restyle can now change your background as well: in the wizard's Customize step or the editor's theme menu, it may choose a plain color, one of the built in patterns with coordinated colors, or a background from the curated library. Your current background stays unless your request calls for a new look or it clashes with the new colors
  • Restyled colors are always checked against the background, so no more white text on a white page: any text, title, or price color that would be hard to read is nudged darker or lighter until it reads clearly
  • In the wizard, a background chosen by AI carries the same AI badge as other enhanced fields; pick one yourself and the badge clears, or reset the AI changes to get your previous background and frame thickness back
  • A Frame thickness slider joins the wizard's Customize step, so a frame background can be sized before the menu is created; it starts at a sensible size for your page and the preview stays visible while it redraws
  • A round of polish on the menu wizard's final steps
  • Generation is more resilient: a run that stops producing output is detected within a minute and retried inside the same time budget instead of running out the clock, and an expired server side cache no longer fails the job
  • The editor no longer breaks when Chrome's built in translation, or a similar browser translator, is rewriting the page
  • A dropped connection while your session renews now shows as a network problem rather than an unexpected error
  • Polish with AI, AI restyles, and menu translations moved to a newer model; menu generation is unchanged
2026-08-31

Section titles on a side rail, and six new themes

  • A new left rail section layout places the section title in a narrow band beside the dishes instead of above them, a look you will recognize from upscale and European menus
  • Three ready-made section designs use it: Left rail, a tall title in your theme's primary color; Left rail wide, where the band takes a full half of the section; and Left rail compact, a smaller title with a thin rule beneath it
  • Set the rail as narrow or as wide as you like, up to half the section, from the section's properties panel; your chosen width sticks through restyles and layout changes
  • Left rail sections look the same in the editor, in print, and in PDF and image exports; on a phone, your published menu folds the title back above the dishes so nothing gets cramped
  • Six new themes join the collection, led by Beer garden: a golden beer illustration whose white foam band carries the section titles on a side rail, made for beer lists, taprooms, and pub menus
  • The other five: Wine cellar, a deep red page with wine glass silhouettes for wine lists and bars; Golden leaves, a golden leaf frame for garden and vegetarian menus; Fiesta tiles, bright tile bands for taquerias and street food; Pastel patchwork, a soft checker frame for bakeries and brunch; and Checker mono, crisp black and white for modern bistros and coffee bars
  • Existing seafood and beer backgrounds were cleaned up: stray baked-in border lines are gone, so your own frames and cards sit on art that stays out of their way
2026-08-28

Your logo and artwork, straight from your upload

  • Match the original design now goes further: the actual artwork inside an uploaded PDF, your logo and your background art, is lifted out and placed in the generated menu instead of being imitated with stock patterns
  • Professionally designed menus built from vector artwork are captured at full quality, so an extracted logo or background stays crisp at any size, on screen and in print
  • Everything extracted lands in My assets, ready to rename, delete, or reuse on any menu; the background picker offers your own images from My assets and keeps the built-in collection separate
  • Each page can take its own background, so an upload whose cover looks different from its inner pages comes out that way too
  • Cover pages are recognized: a branding front page in your upload is rebuilt as a real, editable page, with your logo placed as a proper brand logo element you can swap or resize over the original background
  • Covers always print with the menu but stay off your published web menu by default; a new show on web toggle in each page's panel lets you decide for any page
  • Long dish names now wrap onto a second line instead of being cut off, with dietary and allergen chips staying neatly beside the name
  • Allergen chips now match your dietary tags in size and alignment, so a dish carrying both shows one tidy row
  • Allergen suggestions during generation now come through reliably; they could previously be skipped even with the setting on. The automatic legend no longer overlaps the disclaimer on generated menus, and it stays put when its codes change
  • Published menus with multiple columns now split long sections across columns exactly the way the editor shows them
  • Dish photos on published menus viewed on a phone keep their proportions instead of stretching tall
2026-08-26

Sections that flow across columns and pages

  • A long section no longer has to fit in a single column: it now continues into the next column, and onto the next page when it needs to, with its section card drawn neatly around each part
  • Columns fill in balance as sections flow, so a two column page comes out even instead of lopsided
  • Choose how many columns each page uses from the page's panel in the editor; different pages of the same menu can use different column counts
  • Menu generation now chooses a column count page by page, so a dense drinks page can run two columns while the food menu stays at one
  • Generating from a multi page menu keeps your original page count, and new pages are named from their content, Starters or Desserts rather than Page 1
  • Dishes that list many choices without individual prices, such as toppings or flavors, now flow their options as compact running text instead of a long column
  • A new ready-made section design joins the collection: the title flanked by solid rules
  • Match the original design polish: the proposal now prepares inside one compact card, picking a different theme while it prepares is always respected, and resetting an AI restyle brings back your matched design
2026-08-25

Generation that knows your menu's language

  • Menu generation now detects the language your menu is written in and sets it as the base language for translations automatically
  • Want a different base, or was the detection off? You can change the base language yourself, right up until the first translation is added
  • Closed days come through generation correctly: hours such as Monday: closed land in your opening hours element as closed
  • If generation cannot complete, the message now says exactly why and what to do next, and when a plan limit is the reason it quotes your plan's actual numbers; limits are also checked up front, before you upload anything
  • Generation works to a firm time budget of a few minutes, so you always end up with a menu or clear next steps, never an endless spinner
  • Postal code fields now accept any format worldwide
  • The restaurant website field checks the address as you type, so a typo is flagged before you save
2026-08-24

Match your original design, and ornaments for section titles

  • Generating from a photo or PDF of an existing menu? A new Match the original design option reads the colors, fonts, and layout of your upload and proposes a matching style; it appears on the theme step as a Matched from your upload card, already selected, and you can still choose any other theme
  • The matched style always reflects what you actually uploaded: change your source files or switch the option off and the proposal is discarded and made fresh
  • Section titles can now carry decorations: an ornamental line (wave, zigzag, dots, diamonds, and more) or an icon on either side of the title, in any color, set from the section's properties panel
  • New ready-made section designs come with decorations already in place, and decorations size themselves from the title's font so they stay in proportion when you restyle
  • Decorations look the same everywhere: in the editor, on your published menu, in PDF and image exports, and in print
  • Restoring an earlier version from history now also restores the theme that version was using, so old content never comes back dressed in newer styling
  • A brief authentication hiccup no longer signs you out mid-session; the app quietly refreshes your session and carries on
2026-08-22

Pan from anywhere, and a shortcut cheat sheet

  • Hold Space, or press the middle mouse button, to pan the canvas from anywhere in the editor; the browser's back-swipe gesture is blocked over the canvas so a sideways scroll can never throw you out of your menu
  • The Help page now uses the full width of the window and includes a cheat sheet of every editor keyboard shortcut
  • Rulers stay the same size at every zoom level, and ruler and grid colors now adapt to photo backgrounds too, not just solid colors
  • Snapping polish: elements snap by their visible edges while dragging, and a dish's photo no longer snaps against its own dish
  • The minimum size an element can be resized to is now the same at every zoom level
  • Image exports of translated menus render the allergen legend in the chosen language
  • Hidden dishes no longer stretch section cards in print
  • Prices come through menu generation more cleanly: currency words such as Rs and price ranges are now recognized and stripped correctly
  • Sharing a menu image from a browser that blocks the share sheet now downloads the image instead of failing silently
  • While a menu is read-only because a colleague is editing it, undo and redo are disabled so nothing can be changed by accident
2026-08-21

A grid from the start, visible on any background

  • Every menu now opens in the editor with a 25 px grid already showing, so layouts start aligned instead of eyeballed; change the spacing in the Guides panel, or set it to 0 to hide the grid
  • Menus where you had already picked a grid spacing keep it; the new default only applies to menus that never set one
  • Grid lines and ruler marks now adapt to your page: on a dark or richly colored background they switch to a lighter palette instead of vanishing into it
  • Snap to grid follows whatever spacing is in effect, so snapping works on the default grid without any setup
2026-08-20

Help that stays current, and a newer model for generation

  • The Help page in the app now takes you to the full documentation on menuauthor.com, with a guide and screenshots for every feature that is kept up to date as things ship; feature requests and contact are still one click away from there
  • Menu generation from photos, PDFs, spreadsheets, and pasted text now runs on a newer generation AI model