![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yet another wrinkle...
Feb. 5th, 2012 12:51 pmBetween feeling a bit puny and exhibiting my natural weekend laziness, I put off translating the item due tonight until this morning. Silly me.
I first began to smell a rat when several table entries were ignored—lock, stock, and ampersand—by Wordfast. And it wasn't at all a regular kind of "won't touch this," but selective. Investigating further, it turns out most of the text in the document exists in fields, those ever-loving constructs that Miscrosoft Word offers the savvy user to make life easier (but not necessarily that of Wordfast-using translators, as Wordfast just skips over such constructs).
So, I've spent the better part of the morning trying to figure out a way to "de-field" the document while retaining the text in said fields. The most straightforward method would appear to consist of highlighting the field and then performing a "Paste Special" of unformatted text. I even wrote a macro to do this for me.
Where things get hairy is when the paste fails, calling forth the enigmatic "error 4198: Command failed". The Web is chock full of sites that attempt to address the issue, in versions of Word that go back to when Windows was still marketed with a version number.
I suspect this is going to be a recurring problem, but there's no time right now to find a rock-solid solution. (Now if only the originator of these documents were to pursue the same zeal when it comes to formatting—for example, to avoid the mixed use of the space bar, tab key, and Word paragraph formatting to indent a series of paragraphs—at least there would be balance to the universe, but I digress... and make assumptions.)
Cheers...
I first began to smell a rat when several table entries were ignored—lock, stock, and ampersand—by Wordfast. And it wasn't at all a regular kind of "won't touch this," but selective. Investigating further, it turns out most of the text in the document exists in fields, those ever-loving constructs that Miscrosoft Word offers the savvy user to make life easier (but not necessarily that of Wordfast-using translators, as Wordfast just skips over such constructs).
So, I've spent the better part of the morning trying to figure out a way to "de-field" the document while retaining the text in said fields. The most straightforward method would appear to consist of highlighting the field and then performing a "Paste Special" of unformatted text. I even wrote a macro to do this for me.
Where things get hairy is when the paste fails, calling forth the enigmatic "error 4198: Command failed". The Web is chock full of sites that attempt to address the issue, in versions of Word that go back to when Windows was still marketed with a version number.
I suspect this is going to be a recurring problem, but there's no time right now to find a rock-solid solution. (Now if only the originator of these documents were to pursue the same zeal when it comes to formatting—for example, to avoid the mixed use of the space bar, tab key, and Word paragraph formatting to indent a series of paragraphs—at least there would be balance to the universe, but I digress... and make assumptions.)
Cheers...
