Those pesky memoQ previews

For many translation tasks in some translation environments such as memoQ or SDL Trados Studio, the document preview functions are enormously helpful to understand the context of the text to be translated, and the integration of the preview in the working windows of the CAT tool saves time over staring at printouts or scrolling through PDF files in many cases. The ability to use a preview to jump to a particular point in the translation grid is also a fine thing.

But too often the document preview in memoQ looks like the screenshot above - i.e. no preview visible, even when the file import dialog indicated no trouble creating one. I have cursed a lot about this for a long time, reimported files in the hopes of seeing a preview, sometimes opened and closed the file in memoQ to get the preview to show. It's pretty much of a crapshoot sometimes, and too often I throw "snake eyes". The problem seems to be worse on a slow laptop I sometimes use, which has far less RAM than my usual fast working machine.

Quite by accident recently, I noticed that one can often "recover" a missing memoQ preview by toggling between the HTML preview and one of the other two options which appears when the cursor passes over the upper right portion of the view pane. While I hope that Kilgray's developers can sort out these problems in a better way, in the meantime this procedure might reduce the irritation of some who work with this generally good tool.