SDL wins the battle for AutoCADs

[gentle]

Sad to say I've arrived to a conclusion: I've discovered a true weakness in our "beloved", highly intuitive and user-friendly MemSource: the processing of AutoCADs. For that, SDL seems unbeatable!

[nabylm]

I used your tutorial and have to say it couldnt have worked better! Thanks a lot for that.
However, I would have to comments:
1/ This TranslateCAD tool extracts text from .DXF files. If you are working with .DWG files, you have to export them as .DXF using AutoCAD before extracting the text.
2/ You should check if TranslateCAD extracted all of the text. Indeed, I was working with CADs that contained editable text as "legends" next to the drawings, and editable notes. Only the notes were extracted by TranslateCAD, and none of the legends were extracted. I couldnt find a way to extract that text with Translate CAD.

[santiagop]

DXF are the Drawing Interchange Format files while DWF are the native AutoCAD files. Is the same than IDML/INDD files for example. Although Memsource goes a step forward accepting INDD files, you still need to work with DXF files for AutoCAD projects. Is not that bad

[santiagop]

By the way, I´ve worked with AutoCAD files translated via SDL but the tool didn't translate all the content. So I had to manually copy-paste lot of texts. I don't know why that happened

[gentle]

Translations of AutoCAD is a tricky task!

Santiago, I believe some of that text may have been embedded some way (either as an image, or as a table/chart like what happens with Excel spreadsheets).

[nabylm]

Indeed gentle, it would be interesting to know how that text was embedded, because when opening it with AutoCAD, it was full editable text. Knowing that, we might be able to avoid that copy-paste santiagop, what do you think?

[gentle]

Indeed gentle, it would be interesting to know how that text was embedded, because when opening it with AutoCAD, it was full editable text.

I once dealt with AutoCADs with embedded charts that were finally sent to a graphic designer for fixing. I remember those charts looking as simple spreadsheets (but did not seem to come from an embedded spreadsheet app like MS Excel). The tricky thing was that, after importing the translated text, it showed in the target language; but, if you made any attempts to accommodate the layout, everything went back to the source. Of course there were many cells affected by text expansion, so that it turned into a real headache.

Again, I'm not sure how the designer ended up fixing it. (I'm pretty sure there was a more automated way!) I do remember the only way I found was to edit the cell and type it all over again.

[santiagop]

Hi Gentle,
In fact, I've worked with fully editable AUTOCAD files and for some reason only the texts in the tags and the notes were properly translated. The texts for the object descriptions remained unchanged

[gentle]

Hi Colleagues! I believe I found a workaround that may define a draw between MemSource and Trados Studio when it comes to translating/localizing AutoCAD files.

Also, some of the tips described at this thread Translating AutoCAD files with MemSource may sound obsolete.

My main concern was that when instructing MemSource to pre-translate the non-translatable content, not only the CAD encoding but other figures were replicated in the target segment and later blocked. I was afraid that, if in need of localization (e.g., of metrics) this may have a negative impact.

The way to avoid this is to convert all that encoding into MemSource tags by simply loading the Trans1 TXT file instructing the system to convert the entity \{[0-9]+\} into a MemSource tag. This instruction of course is built based on regular expressions. I will try it out and keep you posted giving you the chance to do it first and letting me know if it works.

[nabylm]

I didnt get the chance to try that one yet, but I have to admit it looks amazingly nice and simple. Does this "animal" \{[0-9]+\} include all of the autoCADs encoding? Or only those applied to metrics and localization variables?