Studio 2014: en dash replaced by simple hyphen when autopropagating

Question

Dear all, I hope I am posting this in the right forum ... In my current project in Studio 2014 (FrameMaker xml with variables) I notice a strange behavior of AutoPropagate: In German a value range from-to expressed with numbers must be written using an "en dash" (Alt + 0150), e.g. 100&ndash;250 &deg;C. When autopropagating these segments (about 600) I noticed that the "en dash" was used correctly when the numbers were identical, however a simple hyphen appeared when the numbers changed, e.g. 100-280 &deg;C. Did I miss an option somewhere or is this a general problem? 
 Regards, 
 Martina

Martina Klett · Accepted Answer

Hi Paul, 
 
Good to know that you are already aware of the problem and working on a fix. Since I wasn't aware of the problem before using autopropagate, Studio already did its thing ;o) 
 
In this case I will do a bit of filtering and Find&Replace as you suggested (and as was suggested by Jerzy and others on the BDÜ forum where I posted the problem, too). 
 
Regards, 
Martina

Paul · Answer

Hi Martina, 
 
This is a known issue that is waiting for a fix, same problem in Studio 2015. The best advice I can give you (in the absence of anyone else offerring a better idea) is to allow Studio to do it's thing so you can take advantage of the auto-propagation and at least ensure the numbers are all correct, and then do a search & replace across the entire project at the end to put the en dash back. 
 
If you need a bit of help knowing how best to do that let me know? 
 
Regards 
 
Paul

Paul · Answer

Krzysztof Konatowicz 
 Krzysztof Konatowicz said: and Paul has been finding out when this will get addressed for two years That's... well... beyond impressive! 
 Indeed :-( I don't have a good excuse... it's easy to track these issues when reported through a support contract, but very difficult when they are not. We do try to always include the dev reference numbers these days and this helps, so I hope I do a better job of getting close to impressing you in the future. 
 First of all.. I dug out the item and to make it easier to find in future it's under our reference CRQ-15108. 
 This ticket has been closed after some work was put into Studio 2019 SR2 CU5 to resolve part of this... the update TM and auto-propagation were fixed, but there is still a remaining issue that is not being investigated any further. I've summarised the remaining problem here. 
 The remaining AT concern does not relate to what goes in the TM, but rather what is generated by an AT result. For a segment like "100&ndash;250 &deg;C.", when there is no TM match, extended handling of non-translated content introduced in an earlier enhancement now means an AT proposal is generated, specifically "100-250 &deg;C." Here, the standard dash is used; the proposal does not copy whatever dash is used in the target language. This is because there's no guarantee that punctuation conventions in the source language will be the same as those in the target language; they often differ, or (say) use single-width characters in one and double-width in the other, etc. The primary function of a TM system is not to generate a perfect AT proposal when there is no match in the TM, it's to recall saved translations. In this case, once a translation with the desired dash has been saved to the TM, AT proposals are no longer generated for the segments concerned, and instead, 100% matches are returned with the saved punctuation. 
 The workarounds suggested are: 
 
 some detailed maintenance of the TM to remove incorrect entries 
 Use the find and replace in Studio: Find -> \-(\d*) (the hyphen is used here) Replace -> -$1 (the minus is used here) 
 
 That's what I can conclude from the ticket. If you are testing I suggest you only do this with a currently supported version of the product, preferably 2021, because anything still a problem in an older version won't get addressed at all.

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Studio 2014: en dash replaced by simple hyphen when autopropagating