Caroline Durant 

Studio is a translation tool, so the amount of styling changes you can make is limited and dependent on the file type you are dealing with. The first thing would be to see whether your editor is set up to display formatting tags (in the "view" tab):

You could write a comment (exports to the target file) and then modify the target file accordingly. This looks like the cleanest way to me.

DAniel

Caroline Durant 

What happens when you use the command "Clear All Formatting"?

Absolutely nothing! That was the first thing I tried.

My editor is set up to display all tags. I'm already resigned to removing the bold in my target file (fortunately, the translation is for my own use) but was hoping there might be a way to remove it within Trados, too.

Could you please temporarily change the tag display settings to the option with the x:

and then check which filetype has been used by looking at the orange tag at the beginning of the document:

Has the document been processed as a Word doc?

I suspect that this text has been copied from a website (like this one) into a Word document and the text that appears in bold is not formatted bold using the Word bold command. This would explain why it is not converted with a tag in Studio.

You can check this by looking a the Word document in Word.

You're right, it was copied from a website. However, the lines in question are labelled as bold in Word. I shall definitely bear this in mind next time I copy a text from the internet, though!

I've come across the problem in Trados before (not, I think, copied from the internet), and it occurs when an entire sentence in the ST is bold.

there's nothing there, just an orange triangle.

 Caroline Durant 

Caroline Durant said:

I've come across the problem in Trados before (not, I think, copied from the internet), and it occurs when an entire sentence in the ST is bold.

It's not a problem.  It's because Studio moves the tags outside if they relate to the whole sentence since... in theory... you shouldn't need to touch the formatting as it applies to the whole sentence.  

I created a small test file looking like this:

If I open it in Studio, and display tags and formatting I see this:

All the tags are moved out since I don't need them.  If I now display all content I can see all the tags like this:

If I now merge every pair of sentences in each segment I can see how Studio will handle this:

If I go back to my normal view I can clearly see that where the bold formatting was applied to the sentences separately the tags are now inline, but where they were applied in one go (segments #1 and #2) they remain externa as they are not required:

This is how Studio handles tags.

You can see from my simple example that the scenario you have described should not happen.  If I make it a little more complex so I have to do what you have described by merging across a paragraph boundary.  I do this by replicating the second sentence:

So I merge segments #8 and #9 and now this happens:

You can see what happens... Studio has applied (incorrectly in my opinion, but I can see why) the tags from segment #8 to the entire merged segment even though there was no formatting in segment #9 in the first place.  This is because the paragraph attribute under the hood has presided over the operation and retained the external tags for bold in the paragraph instead of bringing the opening and closing tags from segment #8 inline.

The reason for this is even more clear when you show the empty segments that have been merged.  You can see that what Studio actually does under the hood is just take the content from the target in segment #9 and cuts it out, then pastes it into segment #8.  So the formatting tags for the original paragraph are retained:

This is what I believe is happening in your case.  So now that we know this how do we address it?  Well, not too difficult albeit a but finnicky.  Make sure you are showing "All Content" and then just drag and drop the external tags into the segment like this:

This is also one of the reasons why there was resistance to allowing merging over paragraph breaks for so long.  Studio uses files and not a database so the management of this aspect can be quite tricky, and for some file formats you can really make a mess of them if you don't understand what's really going on under the hood.  Walter was spot on when he asked if this was a website or even a PDF conversion as it would be quite an unusual situation for a file properly prepared in Word from the start.

Anyway... hopefully this explains to you what's going on and you'll be able to correct this yourself as needed in the future.

Brilliant, thank you so much! I have now been able to remove the bold formatting from the unbold segment I merged with a bold segment and then split again, so I am very happy. I'll certainly watch out for this in future, too.