Under Community Review

White Space Consistency in Studio

I have noticed a peculiar behavior in Trados Studio.

When you double click a word in a segment (source or target), Studio will normally highlight the word + the white space just after the word, if any.

However, if you mark the last word in a line, Studio will never mark the white space just after the word.

I think it would be better if Studio is consistent in order to avoid double white space in translations.

I guess many translators happen to accidentally make double white spaces because of this.

Kenneth Stormoen
  • in reply to Daniel Brockmann

    Hi Daniel,

    Concerning purely my own experience, I find that almost always when I want to select a word, I want to select just the word and not the trailing space. A typical example might be when performing search and replace during post-editing. I double-click a term I want to replace globally and hit Ctrl+h to bring up the "replace" dialogue. I enter the relevant target term, but now I have to remove the unwanted space from the source term, and if I forget to do so, it will glue my new term to the next word everywhere in the project.

    There are many other scenarios where this behaviour is equally annoying.

    I find that 90% of the time when I select a word, I have to then remove the trailing space, which must have wasted literally millions of keystrokes over the last 20 years or so.

    However, this is just my experience and others may have different preferences.

    For me, the ideal would be to have a configuration parameter where the user can decide whether the trailing space should be selected or not.

    Thank you,

    Neil 

  • Hi   and   - thanks for posting this idea and giving your feedback. We are currently doing a pretty major overhaul of the editor technology and so this is timely feedback for us to take into consideration (it will still take quite some time to be put into Studio, just to set expectations, but we are on it). So if I understand you correctly, you would like to _not_ select the space when double-clicking or pressing Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow? I remember quite some discussions around this, as some users preferred for the space to be included and for others not to have it included. For what it's worth, Microsoft Word includes it, and also both Word and Studio have "smart cut an paste" which can detect if a pasted word or string should have the space included or not (File - Options - Editor - Smart cut and paste in Trados Studio). Would be great to get more feedback so we can come to a hopefully better implementation down the line. Thanks, Daniel

  • For what it's worth, I have been complaining about this infuriating behaviour (selecting the space after a word, when you only want to select the word) since about the dawn of Microsoft Windows. My understanding is that this behaviour has been replicated in many programs because they simply use the Windows API to provide the "select" functionality, and the original developers of Windows saw this as a feature, rather than an infuriating and time-wasting bug. Those programs that don't do this tend to have been ported over from the non-Windows world. I agree that it would be nice if this behaviour could be eliminated, so that only the word is selected.