Ways to improve the usability of QuickPlace?

This is something that has been bothering me for a long time. I translate a lot of software strings with tokens and placeholders, and a lot of HTML/XML content with tags that need to be placed. I also translate English-Chinese so word order is frequently different, often having to completely reverse the sentence structure.

So when I activate QuickPlace, two things are actually hampering my productivity:

  1. Numbers and acronyms filling up the top of the QuickPlace list.
  2. Having to remove my hand from the typing position to use the arrow keys to select the tags I want.

I'd like to ask if there are ways to achieve the following:

  1. Only ever display actual placeholder tags in QuickPlace, regardless of TM configuration. (I work with a lot of small TMs specific to each job that gets updated by my client, so it's a chore to having to always change the TM settings.)
  2. Use a hotkey to "go to next placeholder" in the QuickPlace list.

Ideally, I'd love to have a Next and a Prev shortcut for navigating the QuickPlace pop-up list. But I'd settle for just having the QuickPlace shortcut act as the Next function, so I can Ctrl+OemComma to call the QuickPlace list, then mash Ctrl+OemComma to get to the tag I want.

I'm sure all the translation professionals can understand the pain of moving your hands away from the typing position for virtually every segment. Sometimes multiple times in the same segment.

Parents
  • Hi,

    I totally agree, and posted the same ideas somewhere else. It would be wonderful to get rid of numbers and acronyms from the Quickplace list. And also handle tag elements individually and not as tag pairs, so you have to select text and then insert (I haven't got my head around the use of ghost tags yet, I just get confused by them). Basically treat tags as any other plain text.

    Trados 2007 handled tags just great (it had a keyboard shortcut for ”next tag” for example), so it should be possible again. For now I have changed the shortcut for the Quickplace list to the 2007 one (Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow), which means I already have my finger at the down arrow for the next tag, but that won't help you :/

    Daniel Fransson | SDL Sweden

Reply
  • Hi,

    I totally agree, and posted the same ideas somewhere else. It would be wonderful to get rid of numbers and acronyms from the Quickplace list. And also handle tag elements individually and not as tag pairs, so you have to select text and then insert (I haven't got my head around the use of ghost tags yet, I just get confused by them). Basically treat tags as any other plain text.

    Trados 2007 handled tags just great (it had a keyboard shortcut for ”next tag” for example), so it should be possible again. For now I have changed the shortcut for the Quickplace list to the 2007 one (Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow), which means I already have my finger at the down arrow for the next tag, but that won't help you :/

    Daniel Fransson | SDL Sweden

Children