Excel files with colored non translatables...

Here comes an excel file, with pseudo HTML in the cells.

The HTML tags are red and must not be modified. If you want how the segments look check the follow up post.

Translating that in OmegaT is relatively straightforward:

• save the file as ODS in Openffice.org (or NeoOffice)
  
• put that source file in the /source/ folder of your OmegaT project
  
• load the project and translate
  

The problem is that not only you are going to have all the HTML tags displayed for what they are within the translatable text, but you're going to have to deal with the red color tags that will surround all the HTML...

Not user friendly at all...

Another solution is to do like this:

• copy-paste the column into a text file -> no more red color, will deal with that later
  
• insert a visible marker like @@@ at each end of line
  
• save the file as .html -> no more full HTML tags in the segments
  
• put in /source/
  
• go to Options > Segmentation and add 2 rules. One where you segment before @@@ and one where you segment after @@@, that way you'll nicely isolate the marker and it will be translated only once
  
• load, translate
  

The resulting file should contain all the original tags, without modifications, but some characters in the original may have been converted to HTML references. Replace those with the original character if you think it is better.

Now, open your file in a text editor, remove the @@@ markers and paste the contents into a Write page in OpenOffice.

There, do a "Regular Expression" search for the string: (<[^>]*>)

The string means: a "<" followed by a number of anything but ">" followed by a ">": (basically any HTML tag). The surrounding parenthesis put the matching string into a memory for later retrieval!

and replace by "&" with the style "font color=red". "&" means "the group that was just put into memory".

All your HTML tags should be colored in red now.

Copy-paste the contents into the original file where it needs to be, and deliver !!! Also make sure that one line corresponds to one cell (manipulating the @@@ marker should not change the overall structure but one never knows!)

(There are probably easier ways to deal with such files. Let me know!)

Software updates !

Free software

NeoOffice has turned 2.2.5

NeoOffice is a free software replacement for Microsoft Office and other similar office suites. It is based on OpenOffice.org.
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

VirtualBox has turned 2.0.2

VirtualBox is a free software replacement for Parallels and VMWare and other similar virtualization software.
http://virtualbox.org/

rsync has turned 3.0.4

rsync is a command line utility to backup your files on a remote system. It does smart incremental backups so that you don't have to copy huge file sets when only a few files have been modified. rsync finds the modified parts and will add only the modified part to the original backup.
rsync 2.6.9 is installed by default on OSX 10.5.
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/

StarOffice 9 beta for Mac

It looks like Sun Microsystems is making good use of the work of all the volunteers who made OpenOffice.org run on OSX without X11 (i.e. in OSX speak: like a normal OSX application...)

The beta version is available, with the StarOffice logo instead of the OpenOffice.org one.

I have downloaded the beast but if everything is business as usual, we should not see much differences between the 2 suites, except for a few proprietary things added to the StarOffice version.

StarOffice:
http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/get_beta.jsp (185 mb)
What's new:
http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/docs/StarOffice9_WhatsNew.pdf


OpenOffice.org:
http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/ (157 mb)
What's new:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/featurelistbeta.html

Also, NeoOffice is still running behind in term of code base but has recently released a patch for its 2.2.4 version:
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/patch.php

NeoOffice 2.2.2 Patch 5 and 6, OSX Security Update (and its own update), more QuickLook sites

NeoOffice 2.2.2 patch 5, then 6

The patch fixes a regression introduced in the previous patch and expands Asian text input and layout enhancements to include Chinese, Japanese, and Korean punctuation.

Update

It seems patch 5 introduced regressions in the layout enhancements for CJK punctuation and path 6 specifically removed all the new code introduced by patch 5.

OSX Security Update 2007-009

For OSX 10.5.1 and 10.4.11.
Available from Software Update (under the Apple menu) or from the Apple Donwload page.

Details are here.

Update

Apple released an update to that security update a few days later. It seems the first update introduced a number of new crashes in Safari...

QuickLook

Two sites dedicated to QuickLook plugins.

It looks like the number of domain names that include "quick", "look", and "plugin" is decreasing...

http://www.quicklookplugins.com/ and http://www.qlplugins.com/.

I have a preference for the second in terms of visibility and design.

NeoOffice 2.2.2 Patch 4

NeoOffice 2.2.2 Patch 4 has just been released.

It comes with (from the announcement):

• Improved Microsoft 2007 file handling
  
• Improved Asian text input and layout
  
• Closed a security hole in NeoOffice Base's underlying HSQLDB database engine
  

Patch 4 can be downloaded from the following URL:
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/patch.php

Bento, NeoOffice, OSX 10.4.11

Bento is "the new personal database from FileMaker that's as easy to use as a Mac".

Daringfireball's analysis is quite interesting and convinced me to take a new look at Numbers for my simple database needs...

NeoOffice has just release the second patch for NeoOffice 2.2.

And Apple has also released a point update: OSX 10.4.11, that contains Safari 3.0 and ships a number of other items and fixes.

OpenWordFast

Christmas in November !!!

After the Okapi for Mono package 2 days ago, another package useable on the Mac has just been released: OpenWordFast, a macro for OpenOffice.org that accepts WordFast translation memories.

The project was registered on October 8th, which means that it is yet a little early to expect function parity with WordFast, currently it only accept 100% matches from the TM... But since the project is free software (GPL) I have no doubts that it will find a lot of contributors.

Update:

I received a mail from Oleg, OpenWordFast's developer after congratulating him for his work:

Hi, Jean-Christophe.

Thanks for your post. But OpenWordFast in the raw Beta stage. I'm not tested it on Mac yet.
Its lacks of vital functionality - Glossary, Terminology Recognition, search of not full match TU. 

But I plan to work on this list in the future releases.

Best regards, Oleg Tsygany.

Here we go !

Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) on Mac

(updated to reflect the release of StarOffice 9 for Mac and the OOXML conversion software for Office 2004)

Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows (and its Mac counterpart: Microsoft Office 2008) uses a new file format that has been available for a while now as .docx, .xlsx or .pptx ("x" to distinguish them from the standard MS formats).

The file format is commonly known as OOXML or OpenXML, or more simply as Microsoft Office 2007 format.

Even if the new files don't seem to be very widely used, they sometimes end up on a Mac user's desktop, especially since they are the default file format of the two suites (i.e., you need to go through a number of loops to save to a different format)...

What to do when you encounter such files ?

Since I do not own Office 2008 and I did not have the OOXML update for Office 2004 at the time of the writing, I had to test access with OOXML files created with NeoOffice, from "real" Microsoft .doc, .ppt and .xls. All of the test files were pretty complex and quite heavy and had all been created originally on various versions of Microsoft for Windows.

Access through proprietary applications

The iWorks '08 way

iWorks: $79 from Apple

As far as I can tell, iWorks '08 applications Pages and Keynotes opened the .docx and .pptx files I had created without any problems.

And the result was as good looking as the original files. Very impressive.

When I tried to open the .xlsx file, Numbers was considered as the default application (even the converter was not listed) but it was unable to open it correctly. I'll need to have a "genuine" .xlsx file to test Numbers' capacities.

The problem with iWorks it that it cannot save a file to the new format. It can save it to the iWords default format or to the old Microsoft format, along with a few other more classical formats.

The Microsoft way

Microsoft Office 2008: $399.95 retail, $284.99 online, $239.95 retail upgrade version, $194.99 online upgrade version from Microsoft.
(The prices given correspond to the cheapest available version for professionals, the "Home & Student" package is not available for commercial activity.)

The Mac equivalent of Office 2007, Office 2008, has been available for a few months already. Office 2008 is the quickest way to access the new file format in a relatively smooth and painless way.

If you don't want to acquire Office 2008, you can download Microsoft's "Open XML File Format Converter for Mac". The application is available from here. It is at the bottom of the page, if the URL has not changed...

The converter requires OSX 10.4.8 or later. Microsoft also says that to view the files, you need either Microsoft Office 2004 11.3.4 or later, or Microsoft Office v.X 10.1.9 or later.

If you also install "Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 Update" (description available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953824) you'll also enable "Office 2004 for Mac to read and to write Office documents that are in Open XML Format".

The StarOffice 9 (beta) way

StarOffice: $69.95 (StarOffice 8 price, 9 is still beta), from Sun Microsystems.

StarOffice 9 beta is available from here:
http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/get_beta.jsp

It should work pretty much as OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta. See below.

System wide support on Leopard (OSX 10.5)

Leopard: $129, from Apple.

If you don't (plan to) own any recent version of Office for Mac what can you do ?

Leopard users have the free option of using the new TextEdit. It can open and save the new file format.

OOXML support is system wide, which means that the Finder and other applications will also give you a "quicklook" of such files. Although not all files are equal under Quicklook. Some are displayed properly, some are displayed as a white icon and no contents is shown... The test .pptx worked, the .docx and xlsx did not.

So, support is not extremely good and I would not rely on it to check the translatable contents of a client file...

Access through free applications

OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice anyone?

Users on Panther (10.3) and above can use NeoOffice 2.2. NeoOffice is a sister application of OpenOffice.org.

The current available version of the standard OpenOffice.org (2.4) does not include OOXML support but NeoOffice includes special goodies, like OOXML support, that are found in Novell's version of OpenOffice.org, which is, sadly, not available for the Mac...

As of May 7th, the beta version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is available. This version does include support for OOXML.

As written above, I used NeoOffice to create Office 2007/OOXML files with various degrees of success in terms of interoperability. I am pretty sure NeoOffice could open relatively complex files since the files I fed it for OOXML output were fairly complex, although I'd need to test that.

As text ?

An extreme way to access the contents of such files it to handle them as if they were zipped, unzip them and find the document.xml located somewhere in the folder hierarchy that appears (it would be under /word/ for a Word document). This file is standard XML and can be opened in any text editor.

To properly access the contents of the file, you'd need to use Okapi's Tikal utility, available for the Mono (free) running environment. Tikal should be able to extract the contents of the XML into an XLIFF file that you can later load into a translation tool...

Translation

Once you have access to the file, you can translate it by overwriting it in the application of your choice. Saving the resulting file to .docx will produce results that vary with the application you used. A best bet would be to save the result to .rtf for delivery.

OmegaT and other Java based applications

If you want to use a translation memory tool, the few I know that directly handle OOXML are OmegaT, Swordfish, the newborn from Maxprograms, and Heartsome's Translation Suite.

Appletrans

If you have converted the file to .rtf or HTML before translation, AppleTrans should be able to handle it directly.

Okapi's Tikal for conversion to XLIFF

Or, as written above, you can use Okapi's Tikal command line utility to convert its contents to XLIFF and translate it in any of the above mentioned applications.

Wordfast

The Microsoft converter opens the file in Word in the RTF format and you can then use WordFast to translate it directly (from within Word 2004 / Word v.X).

OpenLanguageTools

With hacks, you can also translate the document.xml file in OpenLanguageTools.

Have I forgotten your favorite tool ?