How to activate Formatting functions in Trados Studio 2015

Question

I have just activated my Trados Studio 2015 and I cannot access the Formatting functions; for example, I cannot put my text in italic or in an exponent form. I see the buttons in my task bar but I cannot click on it. How do I activate these functions?

Jerzy Czopik · Answer

Why do you need to do that? Studio is not expected to format any text, as this is a tool for translating existing text including the formatting of the source. We are not expected to add any formatting to the target, which did not exist in source. 
If you however need to transfer the existing formatting from source, so use the Quick Place method.

Paul · Answer

Unknown said: Thank you for your answer but why would they integrate these features if it is so useless? Hi Isabelle, Normally these features are activated if the filetype you are working on supports them. If we don't know what to use then they are greyed out. So for example, if you were handling an XML file where the use of formatting like this is entirely up to the designer of the XML file and the application that is using the XML, then we can't possibly know what is needed. Bold text could be represented by or or or or or whatever the developer had in mind. We have zero ways of knowing this, so if we allowed the user to insert some code we thought was relevant then it could be the reason for the target XML failing when it gets back to it's intended application. All we can do is allow you to use tags that are already in the file. Office files are different for example because these use the same tagging for all their files and the format is published. So we can introduce new formatting tags safe in the knowledge we won't break anything. But even with Office files there can sometimes be problems because some developers manually create office formats from other applications. When they do this and we are unable to recognise what this is then you may find that the ability to insert new tags is missing there too. So Jerzy's comment is related to how any standalone translation tool works. Regards Paul

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How to activate Formatting functions in Trados Studio 2015