We’re leading up to Christmas….

01… and path handling in Studio can still be a little challenging.  I imagine that’s a statement not too many users would disagree with!  There is a knack to using it, and if you can allow Studio to do its thing, which is what the black box translation environments of some competitive solutions do anyway, then it is something you can live with.  But if you want to have the physical Studio projects set up in the same way as your customer folders, which the black box approach can’t do, then Studio can be a little frustrating at times when in your eagerness to tackle the work your projects are stored in a location you didn’t intend because you missed the prompts to change it!  I even wrote about this once in an effort to explain the inner workings of path handling in Studio, “Maybe it’s buried where you put it!!“.

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Good bugs… bad bugs!

01What the heck is a good bug? I don’t know if there is an official definition for this so I’m going to invent one.

An unintended positive side effect as a result of computer software not working as intended.

I reckon this is a fairly regular occurrence and I have definitely seen it before.  So for example, in an earlier version of Studio you could do a search and replace in the source and actually change the source content.  This was before “Edit source” was made available… sadly it was fixed pretty quickly and you can no longer do this unless you use the SDLXLIFF Toolkit or work in the SDLXLIFF directly with a text editor.  In the gaming world it happens all the time, possibly the most famous being the original Space Invaders game where the levels got faster and faster as you killed more aliens.  This was apparently not by design but it was the result of the processor speed being limited, so as you killed the aliens the number of graphics reduced and the rendering got faster and faster… now all games behave this way!  Another interesting example in the Linux/Unix world is using a dot at the start of a filename to hide it from view.  This was apparently a bug that was so useful it was never “fixed”.

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Feature rich… it’s overflowing!

01I first wrote about the Glossary Converter on September 17, 2012… over three years ago.  Not only is it a surprisingly long time ago, but I still meet people at every conference I attend who have never heard of this marvelous little tool, and in some cases never heard of the OpenExchange either.  So when I toyed with the idea of writing an article about Xmas coming early and talking about the OpenExchange and all the goodies inside, part of me couldn’t resist writing about this tool again.  In the three years since it was first released it’s morphed beyond all recognition and today it’s awash with features that belie it’s appearance.

I like to take a little credit for the emergence of this tool because back in 2012 I asked around trying to get someone to create one so that it was straightforward for anyone to create a MultiTerm Glossary from a simple two column spreadsheet… the sort of glossary that most translators use for their day to day needs.  I was over the moon when Gerhard (the developer) was interested and created the tool I wrote about back then.  But I can take no credit whatsoever for what the tool has become today and it’s well worth revisiting!

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Read this and I may have to shoot you!

01Chapter One

“Gabriela descended from the train, cautiously looking around for signs that she may have been followed. Earlier in the week she’d left arrangements to meet László at the Hannover end of Platform 7, and after three hours travelling in a crowded train to get there was in no mood to find he hadn’t got her message. She walked up the platform and as she got closer could recognise his silhouette even though he was facing the opposite direction. It looked safe, so she continued to make her way towards him, close enough to slip a document into the open bag by his side. She whispered ‘Read this and I may have to shoot you!’ László left without even a glance in her direction, only a quick look down to make sure there was no BOM.”

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