Formatting problem

Question

Good afternoon, 
 I am new in SDL Trados Studio and become frustrating about the formatting. 
 I have received the same document in Word and in Pdf and I need to translate it. The document is a manual and has a lot of pictures it means quite complicate formatting. 
 I uploaded the document in Word without problems and while I translate the text I wanted to see the "Preview". I noticed that in there is a big mess in formatting. Mostly the pictures were placed in the other pages or in other places on the right page. So I tried to upload in Pdf and set it well for this type of document but still the same result - formatting was wrong. 
 I thought that if I upload the document in Word it will not be a problem to translate it into Word again without any change in the formatting of the document. 
 How can I resolve this? 
 Thank you very much in advance!

Jerzy Czopik · Accepted Answer

Dear Ali 
 Jerzy Czopik , is there a way that this can be performed in Word, do you think? It might help... 
 You mean "normalizing" of the document? 
 Provided one single font has been used in Word and - which is quite lucky case - all the text is in black, you can first adapt the Standard or Normal style (the name depends on the language version of Word) to fit the "body text", for example if a simple paragraph of text is Times New Roman 12 point, then adapt the style to TNR 12 point and set the color there to automatic. Then press CTRL+A and CTRL+D. On the first tab select "Times New Roman" as font and chose the Automatic color. Press ok. Then press CTRL+A and CTRL+D again to make sure all document content has been selected, switch to the Advanced tab and set the scaling to either 100% (your translation is not longer) or something between 100 and 98%, if your translation is longer. You can also squeeze the text by changing the spacing to -0,01 points (nearly no one will notice) or -0,02 (some will notice). This can reduce the text so far, that the changes due to the text length will nearly disappear completely. 
 However, in this very case, the problems seems to be caused by compatibility problems - as Zuzana pointed out, even an untranslated document, stored from Studio, does change the layout. So it seems, that the conversion into SDLXLIFF and the back to Word switches the format from one Word version to another. This can have a very big influence on the layout, especially if the original document is crappy formatted. 
 @ Zuzana Kubatova - if you wish, send me the document offline (jerzy at czopik dot com) for some investigation. 
 Best regards, Jerzy

Jerzy Czopik · Answer

Bad news, sorry. 
The document is a very crappy PDF conversion, done by saving the Word directly from Acrobat. I have tried to convert myself, but the result is as poor as in case of the file you've got from your customer. And indeed, the formatting change is a result of a version changes. For example, when I open the document stored from Acrobat in Word 2016, then change the compatibility to Word 2016, the formatting goes nuts at once. 
So what you need is really a source file from the customer you can work with without problems. As the source was InDesign, simply request the proper IDML. This will reveal all formatting changes. 
Otherwise I would simply refuse to work on formatted document and deliver a plain text document with the translation instead. Unfortunately there is really no way to get rid of the crappy formatting. 
I have tried to reduce the font size and use the 2013 file type - which seems more or less to keep the formatting, provided the target text won't be much longer than the English one.

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Formatting problem