[Freecats-Dev] DTP, FutureMacMem, AppleWorks...

[Henri Chorand]

Hi all,

Kirk told me how it was important to enable Free CATS to deal, eventually,
with the various file formats of proprietary DTP software, especially for
the Mac platform.

I my previous post about our bilingual working format, I reckon there might
be pending issues. A simple remark: existing CAT tools are not handy (to say
the least) for processing these DTP files. So if the worst hypothesis
becomes true, Free CATS won't be any worse/better than proprietary CAT
tools.

Following a recent post on Wordfast discussion list, I suggest to begin
looking for possible solutions or stop-gaps, as indicated:
RWS tools (Horizon) from http://www.translate.com
ITP Filter (was available from http://www.itp.ie)

As I see things, the perfect solution may come one day from a free DTP
software that will know how to deal with proprietary DTP files (XPress,
FrameMaker, PageMaker, InDesign & the like), exactly like Open Office
superbly imports file formats such as MS DOC, RTF and many other. I recently
saw a KDE project which looks rather promising (I had the feeling it was a
good substitute for a lower- to middle-range like MS Publisher - no offence
meant to anyone here).


Kirk (a long-time Mac user, not to say addict) also posted the following
info in a Yahoo group dedicated to building a CAT tool for Mac. Kirk, next
time, you may directly post to the (un-moderated) Free CATS Dev List ;-)


Henri


------ Forwarded Message
From: Kirk McElhearn <address@hidden>
Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 11:14:04 +0100
To: "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [FutureMacMem] Re: FutureMacMem and AppleWorks

On 2/6/03 11:01, "Mark Willan" <address@hidden> wrote:

>>
>> BTW, Word does not use services in OS X, and TypeIt4Me uses a totally
>> different tack - it is considered an input device.
>>
>
> Maybe you have hit the nail on the head here.
>
> I strongly feel that what i want to see is not yet another CAT tool
> that just does what existing CAT does - that is playing catch-up and
> not leading the field in anything at all.
>
> What I would like to see is some approach that gives a new
> unioversality to the file types that can be handled, and in addition
> gives the translator the optiob to do more things and/or differently
> than in previous software.
>
> maybe software that is handed as an input device is just the kind of
> approach we need,,,

Interesting...  But I'm not sure what the technical issues are behind it -
what it can access, how fast it is, etc.

I could imagine, though, a program that looks for text you have selected,
and offers a translation in a segment - select the text then hit a key
combination. It's only one step further to create another key combination
that automatically selects the next segment (using standard segmentation
rules) and sends the lookup key. If this could be done, it would work for
_any_ file format, because it would only be looking up text.

Worth exploring, perhaps.


Kirk