Sunday, April 29, 2007

Organizing windows

Many CAT tools offer almost de facto "all views fixed in one window" interface. Good or bad, AppleTrans is not the case. You can arrange separate tool windows anywhere in your screen.

Some people don't like this because they want all views to get aligned side by side, siting in the same place all the time. All right folks, here is another tip for you.

By hitting Control-Shift-F12 key, you can let AppleTrans remember the current positions of the key document and preview windows, and the frontmost two corpus windows. You can then arrange the windows to that positions any time by hitting Control-F12 key. Pretty handy, isn't it?

posted by hiruneko at 1:22 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Wordfast TM+X?

Recently I came across an interesting thread on a yahoo group, discussing alternative ways to convert Wordfast TM to TMX format. Needless to say, Wordfast should do the job better than anything else. Or does it not?

Of course, my preference is to use AppleTrans if you ask me (thanks to Steven for summarizing the alignment tool.) If you're really running out of time, here's a one-liner for you to make it quick in Terminal:

% (iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 | tr '\r' '\n' | sed "s/&/\&amp;/g;s/&amp;'/\&#x/g" | awk -Ft 'BEGIN{print"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<tmx version=\"1.4\">\n<header creationtool=\"unknown\" creationtoolversion=\"1\" datatype=\"unknown\" segtype=\"sentence\" adminlang=\"en\" srclang=\"en\" o-tmf=\"unknown\">\n</header>\n<body>"}{if(1<NR)print"<tu>\n<tuv xml:lang=\""$4"\"><seg>"$5"</seg></tuv>\n<tuv xml:lang=\""$6"\"><seg>"$7"</seg></tuv>\n</tu>"}END{print "</body>\n</tmx>"}') < YOURSOURCE.TXT > YOURTARGET.TMX

Actually if you have a little knowledge about Unix basic commands plus TMX specification, this is not really hard to come out. There's no need to hire the power of perl or other fancy scripting languages.

This one-liner doesn't preserve the attributes such as user id or creation date. That's not a big deal for AppleTrans user. I will leave those missing pieces for you to challenge.

For those who want it sugarcoated, I will post a droplet to the SIG, maybe on a good sunny weekend. Stay tuned.

posted by hiruneko at 1:04 AM 1 comments