Several methods of selecting segments. The best is to use shortcuts: unfortunately I do not remember defaults. Go to Home page and check the shortcut list there, look for "Select next row".

Use this shortcut to select segments, then "Merge" should become active. If you want to merge over paragraph boundaries, do the same - but before make sure your project does support this:

Unknown said:

If I understand this correctly, I will only be able to do this kind of merging if the project has been created specifically for that purpose (by enabling «Allow source editing» and disabling «Disable merging segments across paragraphs»). If the projects aren't created like this, I won't be able to do this kind of merging. Am I right?

Maybe review this article... and the comments as there are some interesting ones in there too.

https://multifarious.filkin.com/2016/11/21/bridging-the-divide-merging-segments/

Regards

Paul

Yes and no...

All projects created yourself can have this option enabled by default.

For projects received from your customers some extra work is involved. When you receive a package, a "sdlproj" file will be created within the package folder. After having received the package in Studio, remove it from the list by right clicking the project in the project list. Now go to the project folder, right click the sdlproj file and open it with any text editor (preferably Notepad++, but NOT Word!). Search there for "AllowSourceEditing" and change the value from "False" to "True". Do the same for "AllowMergeAcrossParagraphs". Save the file. Double click it to register the project again in Studio.

From that moment you'll be able to merge across paragraph breaks. But please note: merging across paragraph breaks IS NOT an option in certain formats, so it is your responsibility to use this function in a responsible way.

Yes and no...

All projects created yourself can have this option enabled by default.

For projects received from your customers some extra work is involved. When you receive a package, a "sdlproj" file will be created within the package folder. After having received the package in Studio, remove it from the list by right clicking the project in the project list. Now go to the project folder, right click the sdlproj file and open it with any text editor (preferably Notepad++, but NOT Word!). Search there for "AllowSourceEditing" and change the value from "False" to "True". Do the same for "AllowMergeAcrossParagraphs". Save the file. Double click it to register the project again in Studio.

From that moment you'll be able to merge across paragraph breaks. But please note: merging across paragraph breaks IS NOT an option in certain formats, so it is your responsibility to use this function in a responsible way.

Unknown said:

From that moment you'll be able to merge across paragraph breaks. But please note: merging across paragraph breaks IS NOT an option in certain formats, so it is your responsibility to use this function in a responsible way.

I cannot emphasise this enough.  If you take this approach you are essentially hacking a restriction that may have been deliberately put there.  Think well before doing this.

As I said before, I had already read the article, but I have to admit I focused on finding how I could do the merging, more than its consequences. Now that I know how to do it, I read the article again more thoroughly and even watched the video this time. A very illustrative, useful video, I should say. So now I know exactly how merging works and why it should be used carefully. Thank you very much for this very useful piece of information.

Now, I see it is not possible to actually remove segments in Trados Studio. I wonder if an update of the software could include such a function and whether removing segments in Studio could be a solution to the problem of empty lines in Word and more importantly, empty trans units or whatever code in XML or Excel files. I'd like to know what you think.

I think the solution is either enabling Studio to handle hard breaks in the bilingual files or to support a kind of virtual merging...

This is indeed what I (and many others afair) originally suggested quite a time ago. The current way of merging segments is very similar to a workaround I was using since source editing is there: copy the content of badly segmented source segments into the first segment, then translate this segment and insert a double space for all other segments, where I finally have always left the bad text parts, but always changed the status to sign-off rejected and locked them.

The big difference between the merging of the segments as it is now and my workaround is, that when segments are merged empty segments are created on both sides and this can very well destroy the file structure, while when editing source and leaving the segments with a double space keeps the file structure intact. So maybe a simple change in the method to just insert a space on both sides would result in a much more safe merging.