Marking (wasting) time...
Aug. 17th, 2002 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpHaving someone leave the store today to go get Galina to spell me just didn't work out, so she got the day off. Shannon and Huntur came be the store to keep Drew and me company, and that was nice. I think I'm getting the knack of working with an infant, because Huntur and I had some fun (i.e., teaching her how to press the NO SALE key on the cash register, which causes the machine to make satisfyingly strange noises and pop the cash drawer out).
Upon returning home, I took a one-hour nap.
As I took a closer look at the files sent to me yesterday, I notice that all but one of them are Excel files! Aaarrrgghhhh!
Attempting to import them into Déjà Vu netted me a "no can do" error, one which Atril (the publisher) has been awfully negligent in addressing (especially since I not only brought it to their attention, but also sent a sample offending file, too).
So, I decided to finally bite the bullet and become conversant in the Trados package that I bought a couple of months ago and only got around to installing a couple of weeks ago.
Unlike about 90% of software out there that appears (to me, at least) to be pretty intuitive, working with Trados without the manuals is pretty much impossible. You get the feeling you're a primate trying to fly a Space Shuttle. Unfortunately, all of the documentation (except for a thin "Getting Started" guide) is on the CD in PDF format, and since my monitor is not exactly big (nor is my machine's memory), and since I hate reading online program documentation that's not germane to a task I'm performing right now (e.g., getting help for a function call while programming), that meant having to print out a couple of books worth of pages.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to figure out what documentation you need, so you have to basically start somewhere by printing out something with a likely title. Of course, what I got I didn't really need. Along the way, I was exposed to an interesting phenomenon that I finally had explained to me by a visit to the Adobe web site.
It turns out that if the available resources on your system are low, Adobe will not be able to send text to the printer. You get pages with copyright symbols, shadow backgrounds for paragraphs, and a few lines, but no text. That only cost me 50 pages.
Anyway, after printing out 250 pages of the guide to the "Translator's Workbench," it turns out that this particular star in the Trados firmament does not support the translation of Excel files. I had to use something called "T-Window for Excel" to do that, according to the "Getting Started" guide. Unfortunately, the PDF file I needed was not available via the window that is displayed when the Trados CD is AutoRun, so I had to go in by hand and track down the file myself.
Another 68 pages.
Progress so far is easy to calculate: zero.
Now that the 68 pages has finished printing, I'll go punch holes and read the sucker. I've got to get moving: The first file I have to translate is 2015 rows long and 16 columns wide. Ye gods.
Cheers...
Upon returning home, I took a one-hour nap.
As I took a closer look at the files sent to me yesterday, I notice that all but one of them are Excel files! Aaarrrgghhhh!
Attempting to import them into Déjà Vu netted me a "no can do" error, one which Atril (the publisher) has been awfully negligent in addressing (especially since I not only brought it to their attention, but also sent a sample offending file, too).
So, I decided to finally bite the bullet and become conversant in the Trados package that I bought a couple of months ago and only got around to installing a couple of weeks ago.
Unlike about 90% of software out there that appears (to me, at least) to be pretty intuitive, working with Trados without the manuals is pretty much impossible. You get the feeling you're a primate trying to fly a Space Shuttle. Unfortunately, all of the documentation (except for a thin "Getting Started" guide) is on the CD in PDF format, and since my monitor is not exactly big (nor is my machine's memory), and since I hate reading online program documentation that's not germane to a task I'm performing right now (e.g., getting help for a function call while programming), that meant having to print out a couple of books worth of pages.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to figure out what documentation you need, so you have to basically start somewhere by printing out something with a likely title. Of course, what I got I didn't really need. Along the way, I was exposed to an interesting phenomenon that I finally had explained to me by a visit to the Adobe web site.
It turns out that if the available resources on your system are low, Adobe will not be able to send text to the printer. You get pages with copyright symbols, shadow backgrounds for paragraphs, and a few lines, but no text. That only cost me 50 pages.
Anyway, after printing out 250 pages of the guide to the "Translator's Workbench," it turns out that this particular star in the Trados firmament does not support the translation of Excel files. I had to use something called "T-Window for Excel" to do that, according to the "Getting Started" guide. Unfortunately, the PDF file I needed was not available via the window that is displayed when the Trados CD is AutoRun, so I had to go in by hand and track down the file myself.
Another 68 pages.
Progress so far is easy to calculate: zero.
Now that the 68 pages has finished printing, I'll go punch holes and read the sucker. I've got to get moving: The first file I have to translate is 2015 rows long and 16 columns wide. Ye gods.
Cheers...
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no subject
Date: 2002-08-18 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-08-18 10:28 pm (UTC)I really, really don't mind all-softcopy docs for inexpensive software, say, with a street price of up to about $79. I really, really do mind having to blow through several reams of paper (and perhaps a nice chunk of a laser cartridge) after having sown over $500 into the publisher's pocket. When I worked at Borland, the general rule of thumb was that COGs were to be kept at just under 10% of SRP (and this was in the day of diskette distributions!) I realize the importance of keeping COGs down, but thee are limits to users' patience!
A prime side-effect of the Adobe problem was having to close the application software to print out the docs. (Admittedly, I'm using a "minimal" system, according to the carton words.) As a result, not only am I stuck printing out the docs, but I can't really do anything else in the meantime.
There was no excuse (except, perhaps, aesthetic) for not making all the documentation files available from the AutoRun app. There was also no excuse for naming the files with completely nonintuitive names (the manual for the "Translator's Workbench" had a name along the lines of "TW3ea_rB3J.pdf"). C'mon! Long file names are the "in" thing!
Now, where do I return this soapbox?
Cheers... :^)