Tag: Trados Studio

X-CAT… the next generation?

~ Paul Filkin ~ 21 Comments

01If the title and image I have used for this article reminds you a little of something you might see from Stan Lee in an episode from Marvel Comics, then you have discovered my guilty secret… beneath a “slightly” more serious exterior I have a hidden desire to be able to extend my capabilities and demonstrate super human powers!  Unfortunately I don’t think this is going to happen for me any time soon, so my dream lives on in the mind of my son and probably every imaginative child on the planet!

So I may never become a mutant superhero… but I might be able to redirect some of these latent powers in another direction.  By now, if you know me, you may have guessed it or you may simply be thinking “what is he talking about?”… so with that slightly improbable introduction I’ll elaborate!

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SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) Application Security

~ Paul Filkin ~ 1 Comment

01

Every now and then I see someone ask how they can be sure that the applications available on the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) are safe to use?  This is a very valid question and I read in a whitepaper from Adobe, where they quoted a PwC survey carried out in 2013, that nearly 30% of respondents from 123 countries claimed financial losses due to a software related security incident.

Controlling the security of our own applications, and ensuring we have proper controls in place is one thing… but how do we make sure that applications that have been developed by others, for installation and use with our products via the OpenExchange, are similarly controlled?

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Psst… wanna know a few things about file types?

~ Paul Filkin ~ 11 Comments

01Studio has some excellent capabilities for getting more from your file types, and I’m often surprised by the reaction of Studio users when they find out what’s possible.

It seems we’ve been keeping a big secret that nobody was supposed to know… so I thought it would be worth taking a quick look at just one file type, everyones favourite, Microsoft Word.  The mechanism for finding these options in any filetype and seeing how they can benefit you will be the same as it is for Microsoft Word… and just as simple.  It’s a long post but hopefully useful.

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Moving windows…

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#01One 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.
You can do this if you work with a single monitor or double monitors… or more!  The basic idea is that you detach the windows in Studio and then just move them to where you like, either somewhere on your single monitor so that you can see the views that are more important to you on one screen, or by placing them onto a separate monitor altogether thereby maximising the screen real estate for your edting activity.
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Pimp my Studio 2014…

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#02aA strange title I know, but I thought I could indulge two of my favourite pastimes at the same time… first the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore), and the second customising stuff.
I may have mentioned the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) from time to time in my articles… I do like the OpenExchange… because this is a unique feature of the SDL Language Technologies Platform that is probably underestimated by many users who think it’s only a few little apps that you can download to perform the odd useful function here and there.
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Advanced Renamer… and QuickMerge

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#01Today 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 Advanced Renamer and is developed, and supported, by Kim Jenson.
The problem I wanted to solve is that the user receives several hundred files that make up a technical manual.  These files are not in alphabetical order, and they are not numbered, but they do come with a PDF that explains what the order is.  So the task for the translator, in order to tackle the manual in the most sensible way, is being able to merge the files together for translation in the appropriate order.
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Sometimes it's the little things that matter!

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#01In the unlikely event you’ve been visiting another planet over the last few weeks, you may not have noticed SDL are releasing Studio 2014 soon… how soon?… very soon, but no firm date to share yet before you ask!
This release has some long awaited “big” features such as a new alignment module to replace the WinAlign module developed in the olden days that you can review in a blog article from Daniel Brockmann.  It has some new functionality altogether for the regulated industry workflows around reviewing fully formatted Word documents, making changes and being able to update the translation in Studio automatically… a unique feature that will be useful for many users translating and reviewing with Word in this environment.  And of course we have some customer driven features such as being able to merge files in Studio at any time, and in any Project… rather than only at the Project creation stage.
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More Regex? No, it's time for something completely different.

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#02Now that we’ve learned enough about regular expressions, and because I get so many requests for custom filetypes I thought it might be useful to take a dip into the world of XPath.  So what exactly is XPath?
Well as far as most CAT tools go it probably is something completely different… certainly it was not used in the old Trados days.  But as a tool it’s nothing new and is simply a language used to find parts of an XML document and what’s more it’s a language that is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium W3C.  So there is nothing proprietary here.
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The SDLXLIFF to Legacy Converter

~ Paul Filkin ~ 12 Comments

#01This application, free on the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore), has been around for about a year and a half and is one of the most popular applications on there.  It was written by Patrick Hartnett and is incredibly useful in more ways than one.  In fact it’s so useful I have referred to it quite often and used it for working around other issues in many of the articles I have written… so why haven’t I written specifically about it here until now?  The answer is I have no idea… but I should have done!  What prompted me to write now is that Patrick hasn’t released many updates to this tool, mainly because it did what was needed from the start and has been a really reliable and useful application; but he has released an update this week.
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The PowerShell what?

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#01The PowerShell Toolkit… that’s what!
None the wiser?  Me neither… but it sounds like a really cool idea so I thought if I can do it then so can anyone else if I share the concept a little.  So I’m writing this article as I learn how to use this toolkit!
Powershell is a task automation framework that is installed as part of Windows… the PowerShell Toolkit compiled by Patrik Mazanek of SDL uses this framework and in simple terms it’s a way of providing the tools for automating things that Studio can do without having to redevelop the computer code to do them yourself.  So you already have the means to do this and like me may not have known it at all!
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