Getting back in the groove...

I was pleasantly surprised to see an e-mail from the Trados office in Virginia in my inbox this morning. The suggestions in the message were pretty much the canned stuff that tech support people have on hand for nuisances like me, but the support person put it all in a fairly friendly tone. Basically, my response went down her list, indicating that I'd pretty much done everything she'd indicated, and would they please send me the user name and password to their download area so I could install a patch that would make my install current?

She sent the info, and I installed the patched software, but it didn't help.

In a subsequent e-mail she made a number of suggestions I hadn't thought of: disabling virus scanners (oh, joy!), removing other templates (I'd already done that with everything by the normal.dot, which contains some simple macros to, e.g., turn revision mode on and off), and so on.

I finally removed and reinstalled Word 97 on my desktop, after which... voilà! The Translator's Workbench started working. My attention then switched to my laptop, where I went through the same rigamarole, down to and including removing and reinstalling the Word 2000 that came with the system.

No joy there, though. Finally, it occurred to me to turn off the Kaspersky Office Guard (which I am sure has its fingers in the back of Word's head), and I also disabled MemTurbo to boot.

Wham! Translator's Workbench fired up nicely on my laptop, too.

* * *I finished the work for client U using Déjà Vu and returned to the files from client M. The one and only Word file turns out to be a drawing, on A4 paper (so I can't print it unless I resize the image, which distorts it... ye gods), which I can't edit because I don't own the application that created it. To make things worse, the font embedded in the graphic displays as "extended" characters (i.e., mostly vowels with diacritical marks instead of Cyrillic letters).

That's going to be an ugly file to do, and I'm going to save it for later.

Otherwise, I have three more paper documents and four more files (including the Word File From Hell, described above) on my plate, with the possibility of doing an academic transcript in the near future.

* * *It's been raining on and off, and looking out over the San Juans at various times during the day tells me that it's also raining in the forest, but it's hard to tell how hard. Nonetheless, I figure pretty soon some mushrooms are going to start popping out no matter what, rain or no rain (of course, the more rain, the more mushrooms, and "some" in this context doesn't necessarily mean a lot).

It's been a long day, and I can retire for the day with a feeling of accomplishment. Maybe something will occur to me overnight regarding the Word file.

Cheers...