alexpgp | Sources of pathology...

Historically, the folks who create the files I eventually translate have shown themselves willing to go to any length to get their document to say what they want and look how they want. In the more extreme instances of such behaviour, the resulting file acts in a very unstable manner, and I have taken to describing such files as "pathological."

Recently, I am finding myself dealing with one pathology after another, almost exclusively having to do with tables. In one document, editing the contents of a table cell causes the entire table to reformat itself, and not in a good way. In another, changing the width of a column causes merged cells to unmerge and show text in the "created" cells. In several instances, I've found that exiting Wordfast translation mode causes unwanted text ("droppings") to be left behind.

I am starting to seriously wonder if the problem lies in my source files, or in the environment (MS Word) I use to work with such files.

Cheers...