Everyone knows, I think, that an SDL Trados Studio package (*.sdlppx) is just a zip file containing all the files that are needed to allow you to create your Studio project with all the settings your customer intended. At least it’ll work this way if you use Studio to open the package… quite a few other translation tools these days can open a package and extract the files inside to use but not a single one can help you work with the project in the way it was originally set up. One or two tools do a pretty good job of retaining the integrity of the bilingual files most of the time so they can normally be returned safely, others (like SmartCAT for example… based on a few tests that verified this quite easily) do a very poor job and should be used with caution.
Being smart about a Studio Package…
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It’s funny how questions seem to appear like London buses… you don’t get any and then they all come at once! More often than not it’s very specific questions that behave this way too. So you don’t see them for ages and then you get the same question in a number of places for a day or two and then it goes quiet again! One of the topics that falls into this category is changing the view in the Editor. By this I mean the colour of the text, the font types or the background you’re working on. All these things can be changed in Studio to make it easier if you’re dealing with documents that don’t display well and you want to work in wysiwyg mode.
One of the easiest, and often little known tricks in all Studio versions since the product was released as Studio 2009, is the ability to move the windows around so that you can work in the way you want.
Since Studio 2014 was launched it’s been interesting to see what some users were waiting for. Did they want the Quickmerge, Alignment, AutoSave, improved navigation, blistering speed, automatic concordance search, improved filters, enhanced locking functionality, custom TM user ID, improvements to the term recognition threshold, more options in the display filter, auto-substitution for acronyms and a host of other improvements? No… and I genuinely don’t mean this in a mean way… it seems for some users an easier way to handle typographical quotes is the order of the day and this hasn’t radically changed since TagEditor.
Today I decided to share a Freeware Application I came across whilst trying to find a neat resolution to a problem posed by a Translator using Studio. I know many of you don’t like to use Freeware so I’m not saying anything about this tool other than I think it’s great, and if you’re happy to install it then I’m pleased to have passed on awareness of this tool to you. I am not endorsing it in any way other than that! If you have a policy not to install Freeware tools and still like the idea then I’m sure there are plenty of paid for applications that do a similar job. This tool is called 
So now let’s flip the process on its head!