It’s been a while since I wrote anything about the SDLXLIFF Toolkit.. in fact I haven’t done since it was first released with the 2014 version of Studio. Now that we have added a few new things such as SDLPLUGINS so that apps are better integrated and can be more easily distributed with Studio we have launched a new version of the toolkit for Studio 2017. What’s new? To be honest not a lot, but there are a couple of things that I think warrant this visit.
First of all, the app is now a plugin and this means it loads faster, is always available and there are a few tricks to being able to get the most from this. Secondly, there are a few fixes to the search & replace features that make it possible to complete tasks that Studio will fail with and to do this the API team completely rebuilt the regex engine. So whilst you won’t see too many changes, there are a few under the hood.
The best way to illustrate this is to show you so I have created a short video below where I have tried to explain how best to use the toolkit now it’s a plugin and not a standalone application, and I used the problems described below to demonstrate how it works. If you want to know what else it can do I have reproduced part of the original guide below the video as that seems to have been lost over the years. This might be helpful for a few of the more obscure features you may not have realised were possible.
Wow… how time flies! Over three years ago I wrote an article called 
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
I ran a beginners and an advanced workshop at the ATA56 pre-conference day in Miami this year. A really fun day for me as we start the day with no specific agenda or pre-defined course and then try to shape the session to suit the needs of the attendees. The beginner tends to be a little more prescribed, to start off with at least, and the intention is to try and cover the basics of how Studio and MultiTerm work.
The AutoSuggest feature in Studio has been around since the launch of Studio 2009 and based on the questions I see from time to time I think it’s a feature that could use a little explanation on what it’s all about. In simple terms it’s a mechanism for prompting you as you type with suggested target text that is based on the source text of the document you are translating. So sometimes it might be a translation of some or all of the text in the source segment, and sometimes it might be providing an easy way to replicate the source text into the target. This is done by you entering a character via the keyboard and then Studio suggests suitable text that can be applied with a single keystroke. In terms of productivity this is a great feature and given how many other translation tools have copied this in one form or another I think it’s clear it really works too!
