ah.. found it

It is not related with the Merge

It is the problem of "some kind of MS Word vertical arrangement", I guess..

It is a TABLE, the height of CELL has restriced with unknown reason.

Just let it go, then you will be happy again

Bye..

I beg to disagree a bit. The translators must know, how the tool works and they MUST know, what happens with a PDF file, when it is simply thrown on Studio without taking care about the post processing. The life has changed and we live in 21st century. But TBH the "translators not understanding technicalities" was never valid. Even as we translated from paper, you had to know how formatting in Word works. Now things got more complicated and we have to deal with many more formats than just plain paper. Understanding how your tool works is a necessary prerequisite to deliver high quality translation. Otherwise you deliver crap - even if the translation as such is lingusticaly OK.

There is no excuse for translator not to know the tool used. Exactly as there is no excuse to a nurse not knowing how to enter the data of the patient in her computer. If other processions can learn using computer to their need, I do not see why should translators be excused here.

Jerzy Czopik said:

I beg to disagree a bit. The translators must know, how the tool works and they MUST know, what happens with a PDF file, when it is simply thrown on Studio without taking care about the post processing.

Well, this is an interesting twist ;-)  Translators telling us we don't need to fix something!!

It is certainly a good idea for everyone to learn as much as they can about their software, but that doesn't excuse the software from being able to make this easier and reduce the effort required to mirror the source files provided.  Just because the source files are a poor conversion does not excuse the software from being able to handle them.  We can extract the text ok, so it seems logical that we should be able to preview it and save the target too.

Let's keep this to a discussion on this specific problem... I doubt we disagree about the rest.

IMO, SDL made a kind of mistake when they implemented this "easy for translator" process for translating PDFs.
Something what perhaps originally looked like a competitive advantage turned very quickly to a pain-in-the-ass...

If I would be a product manager, I would seriously think about removing this feature....

Paul Filkin said:

Translators telling us we don't need to fix something!!

But well, there is really nothing to fix... everything works just fine, as I just showed...

Paul Filkin said:

it seems logical that we should be able to preview it and save the target too

But you DO show it in preview and you DO save it in the target too...
It's all about just the bad formatting of the source and the VISUAL(!!!) result...

Evzen Polenka said:

If I would be a product manager, I would seriously think about removing this feature....

I doubt this would happen as there is a healthy volume of these type of files coming through the software and prior to this capability it was always one of the most requested features.  I think a text only extract might be a good idea so we strip out all formatting and leave it to the user to reformat in Word to get the look and feel prior to translation... if they have the time to do it.

I fully agree that we don't disagree.

Just a last remark: if the problem is caused by a fixed line or table cell height, than it is NOT in slightest way a problem of Studio, but entirely the problem of a badly formatted source and in the end the problem of the user not being able to notice and correct this in the target file. Any CAT tool MUST retain the source formatting, otherwise it will be useless.

If you strip all formatting from the PDF after the conversion, the vast majority of the users producing the target file will not even be able to format it... And here is the whole problem: people cannot use the software they are expected to use.

Paul Filkin said:

it was always one of the most requested features

Sure... from people which don't have the faintest idea about why it's 'not possible'... from people who don't understand that PDF is NOT just another document format... from people who hardly have an idea about the technicalities behind.

I believe that "one of the most requested features" from, let's say, often traveling salesmen is a teleport ;-)... but still no transportation company does not do any research or implementation in this regard...
...simply because someone sensibly evaluated the request and found it unreal or not worth the trouble...

Paul Filkin said:

Thanks for the "sample" file.  I created the sort of file I was looking for from your file by saving the source, editing the source and then using that.  File attached so you can see what I was getting at:

Woo..

You wrote "448 words" and I have failed to find Your solution for this problem.

Did I miss something ?

If so, can you please tell me that a little bit more briefly ? 

regards

Jerzy Czopik said:

Any CAT tool MUST retain the source formatting, otherwise it will be useless.

I agree... and as you can see the content perfectly well in the source we must be able to do this in the target too.  This means not taking the approach we do today (in my opinion) as we simply add text into a row where it won't fit.

So it's perhaps not so much of a bug, but rather a problem with the way in which we have resolved this issue of not being able to merge across paragraph breaks.  It might even be something that we cannot avoid with the current capabilities, but let's see what the development team have to say about this first as the change may not be trivial to achieve this.  If this is the case it probably won't get fixed at all since this is (as you mentioned earlier) a rather rare occurrence and definitely avoidable by preparing files for translation properly.

Jerzy Czopik said:

Any CAT tool MUST retain the source formatting, otherwise it will be useless.

I agree... and as you can see the content perfectly well in the source we must be able to do this in the target too.  This means not taking the approach we do today (in my opinion) as we simply add text into a row where it won't fit.

So it's perhaps not so much of a bug, but rather a problem with the way in which we have resolved this issue of not being able to merge across paragraph breaks.  It might even be something that we cannot avoid with the current capabilities, but let's see what the development team have to say about this first as the change may not be trivial to achieve this.  If this is the case it probably won't get fixed at all since this is (as you mentioned earlier) a rather rare occurrence and definitely avoidable by preparing files for translation properly.