Under Community Review

Fix automatically multiple and erroneous spaces

Some sort of Editor option that would either 1) do not allow entering multiple spaces/extra spaces at the beginning/end of a segment or 2) fix them automatically. For example, Metatexis provides such an option at the preparing final version stage. This simple improvement would save hours on QA issues.

Spiros Doikas
  • in reply to Daniel Brockmann

    Well, I think "smart space removal" is an advanced stage of this. It can get more complex, as, for example, in French one would have to use thin spaces in some cases before/after punctuation. Simply removing extra spaces before and after the segment and double/multiple spaces would be a good first step though :)

  • in reply to Spiros Doikas

    I think we removed spaces in the Editor by design at some stage and then all hell broke loose as many users require them to be physically present in the SDLXLIFF file as they need them in the final target... (believe it or not) but yes an option around this could be interesting. Also wondering if the SDLXLIFF toolkit or other apps can help here but not sure what the scope of such apps is with "smart space removal".

  • in reply to Alison Field

    If only I began to count the hours I spent on fixing multiple/erroneous spaces... Using find/replace on each file is quite a... time-consuming way of doing it, especially since segments will need to be confirmed also one way or another.

    By the way, if someone tries to be clever and add two spaces to be replaced with one space in AutoCorrect, the system will not allow you to add it as a replacement.

  • in reply to Alison Field

    Another point about AutoCorrect, is that although it would fix errors at the typing stage (if "Replace text as you type" is checked), it would not fix text which was copied or inserted (by any other means).

  • in reply to Spiros Doikas

    Hi Spiros & Daniel,

    Extra spaces (at beginning or end or anywhere) are not stripped automatically from the segments in the sdlxliff.

    As I'm mostly proofreading these days, I can vouch for that as I often delete them from the translations I'm reviewing. If a translator has been untidy with multiple spaces and I don't want to find loads of multiple space warnings in my QA check, I search the whole document for 2 spaces and Replace All all with 1 until all have gone. Easy for me as the reviewer, but it would be even easier if they had been removed when the translator was typing them Wink

    Would be really useful if there were tickboxes for each context of extra spaces in the AutoCorrect list... Slight smile

    I wonder how easy that would be to program?

    All the best,

    Ali Nerd