Formatting problems with PPTX files

Question

Hi! 
 I work in a translation agency using Trados Studio Professional 2021 + Groupshare to create and allocate projects. 
 Recently, we had an issue with a specific project, in which the PPTX file was processed inside Trados Studio as if all text was originally written in the color white and with a larger font size. As you can see below: 
 I tested the same file in another project and it processes the formatting like this: 
 
 Then, I ran the same file in the original project and it processed perfectly, without the font size and color issues. I can't share project files due to confidentiality issues and I can't seem to replicate the original project, but I would love to know if any of you have had this issue before and how can we prevent it.

Oana Nagy · Answer

Hi Lais Lewicki When it comes to font display in the Editor view, often its purely down to ease during translation and ultimately target translation mirrors source format - with a few exceptions. In your case the font is being managed outside of the actual segments, so this would purely be a display issue during the Editor view. 
 I know there is a concept called Complex Scripting, which may have an input here (although I am under the impression is language specific) As well as layers within the PPT file that may drive the font. 
 But the question still remains, same file, different project, different display of font. I do question if the files has not changed/evolved between. 
 Hopefully someone on the community knows more 
 Have a good day 
 Lyds

Jerzy Czopik · Answer

I am talking about a completely different phenomenon. This has nothing to do with font adaptation, which only limits the font sizes for the view in Studio Editor, but does not change the font displayed itself. What I mean is font substitution. Imagine the following situation: your customer is using a corporate font, lets say RWS Sans. You get a text in this font, open it in Word or PowerPoint and don't even notice, that RWS Sans is not installed on your system, as neither Word nor PP will tell you that. InDesign or other Adobe app would do, so you will at once notice that you don't have the necessary font and could ask the customer for it or do a proper replacement. Now you open such PPTX in Studio. It does not have access to RWS Sans, but uses a replacement font, let's say Arial. You translate and all is fine, as long you remain within the code page for RWS Sans. If that is an unicode font, it should work for all languages. But quite often fonts used are just ASCII or ANSI. And these do not support the target language. So when you add special characters which are not present in the font used, they will be displayed with again another font... To avoid all this simply do not display formatting in Studio. Then all text will be shown in Arial, but due to tags in the background in the target file the original font will be used. 
 In your case the translator simply did see the formatting, but did not notice, that it was applied locally and did not apply the final formatting to the translated segment... Would he/she view tags and have Studio set up not to ignore missing formatting (default setting in TAG Verifier), this would most probably not happen. The problem here is the lack of knowledge how formatting really works. People tend to rely on what they see instead of using the proper way of formatting, which in any CAT tool should be tags.

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Formatting problems with PPTX files