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Nov 29, 2009

Cleaning up more source file messes with Dave Turner

I don't know if the rumors are true that the beatification process has begun in the Vatican by grateful translators there whose prayers for an efficient way to deal with superfluous format tags were answered with Mr. Turner's Code Zapper macro. If not, surely his latest contribution will send him further along the path to Translation Sainthood: the Format Fixer macro, which in his own words
  • deletes leading spaces and tabs inserted typewriter style to indent text, and sets the equivalent indent,
  • deletes excess spaces between words,
  • deletes excess paragraph marks and sets the equivalent vertical spacing, 
  • attempts to correct frequent punctuation errors (space before comma or inside a parenthesis for example),
  • tries to fix PDF converted files (removes hard and soft returns to make text wrap properly),
  • adds a space between a number and a letter as in 20ohm, 10daN -> 20 ohm, 10 daN
It's available free on the Yahoogroups dejavu-l forum (path: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dejavu-l/files/FormatFixer/), but obviously it's useful to anyone who works with text in MS Word or RTF files regardless of CAT religion.
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6 comments:

  1. Stefano KaliFireDecember 02, 2009 2:17 PM

    WOW, thank you, very useful macros!! After posting and article about it in my blog, I will write a note to the Vatican, maybe it helps...

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  2. Grisha GazarianDecember 02, 2009 3:24 PM

    Thank you for the tip!

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  3. UldisDecember 03, 2009 10:17 PM

    Yah, seems useful. Thank you Kevin for a tip and, of course, the author :)

    Uldis

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  4. Kevin LossnerDecember 03, 2009 11:00 PM

    Dave's service to the user communities has really been invaluable. The "rogue code/tag" problem and other formatting issues in Word and RTF files have become so severe in recent years, especially with incompetent use of OCR, that TagEditor, Déjà Vu and MemoQ would often be useless without the means to clean things up. And so far I haven't found any tools better suited to such tasks than the ones Dave gives away.

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  5. UnknownJanuary 28, 2010 12:23 PM

    Many thanks for your kind comments, Kevin!
    Although everyone is welcome to use these tools free of charge, I would point out that a small one-time donation in return for the time and money you save would greatly help to ensure their continued availability and improvement.
    Beatification would be nice but it doesn't pay bills!
    If you feel so inclined, follow this link to access PayPal and make a 20 euro contribution.

    http://asap-traduction.com/Liens-utiles

    Thanks again.
    Dave Turner

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  6. Kevin LossnerJanuary 28, 2010 2:57 PM

    @Dave: Done! And well overdue, actually. We use your tools every single day of the week. Not as well as I should, because I don't understand all the options in the latest versions, but v1.4 is my workhorse.

    Is there a link that isn't in French? I got a bit nervous dealing with an interface I don't understand and can only guess at.

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