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• • October 7, 2010 at 12:04 pm #57281
    GShannon

    Member

    Using CS3 and CS4. I have a long list of styles and want to generate Tags automatically so I can map them to the styles and export an XML file for translation. I can't find how to do that- do I have to manually create every single tag before I can map them?

    Thanks,

    Glen

  • October 8, 2010 at 2:00 pm #57307
    Johan

    Member

    Hi,

    Go to this site: https://macproductionartist.wor…..press.com/

    then click on the post: InDesign Paragraph Styles to XML tags for Groups

    Have fun.

    Johan van Ooijen

  • October 11, 2010 at 8:07 am #57320
    Frederick Yocum

    Member

    A word of warning. If you or your translators have not worked in an XML workflow before, leave plenty of time and have a backup plan. This spring, I attempted handling translations of a document from English to French, German and Spanish. Each translator got an XML document editable in Word.

    Two translators simply refused to use it, the third sent a translated document so badly formed that it could not be imported. I ended up cutting a pasting the content from the XML document. The XML was useful in that it broke the information up into descrete chunks, but outcome of simply pulling the information into the InDesign document did not work.

    There is a reasonably priced plugin called Story Tweaker which is specifically designed for translation work, but again, you need to educate your translators. Difficult to do when working with freelancers who are used to their own methods and in my case, behind a firewall of editors.

  • October 12, 2010 at 10:57 am #57336
    GShannon

    Member

    Thanks for the warning. My general method is to take the XML text into BBEdit and use find/change to strategically insert tabs and line breaks. Then paste the whole thing into Excel, which creates a column of open tags, a column of text for translation, and a column of closing tags. The translator works with the middle column. When I get the Excel file back from the translator, I save as tabbed text, remove the tabs in BBEdit and have a translated XML file. It works pretty well, except sometimes there's an invisible, unselectable character between > and < sometimes, which foils my find/change because it is not “found” so doesn't match my search string. However, the sample I was working with was not so long that it wasn't worth the time to manually fix those instances. I imported the translated XML file back into CS4 and it worked perfectly- 50 pages of English became 50 pages of French, fully laid out, in three seconds! We were amazed.

    I have actually done some tinkering with Story Tweaker, as part of the methodology search for this very project. The translators were very hesitant to check it out, though.

    Thanks Johan for the WordPress link! I will check it out now.

    -Glen

  • October 12, 2010 at 11:16 am #57337
    GShannon

    Member

    Johan,

    Thank you so much for that link, the script worked perfectly! I'll try to modify it for CS4.

    -Glen

  • October 14, 2010 at 12:18 pm #57375
    GShannon

    Member

    Now I have the tags – how do I automatically apply the tags to the content? Sure, I mapped tags to styles, but that didn't apply the tags to the content- it is all still untagged. Using Autotag gives me one tag- “Story”. Am I missing something obvious here? I can't find anything that spells it out for newbies at this game. The really cool example I mention above came pre-tagged so I didn't see that step. Now I have to do it myself, and it's not working out.

    Thanks for any clarity.

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