The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.
This quote really resonates with me. One of my goals with TM-Town is to make the user experience as simple, intuitive and user-friendly as possible. In theory I'm sure this is what every developer wants to do, but in practice it is very difficult. Especially with translation related software. You must deal with many different languages, file formats, encodings, the list doesn't end.
At TM-Town, the user experience usually starts with uploading a document. While TM-Town's upload experience wasn't terrible, I felt it also wasn't great. There were things that frustrated me about it. Parts that weren't intuitive nor easy. So I've worked hard over the past few weeks to completely redesign the upload experience. While this is probably the most notable change you will see with today's update, I also have included some other great goodies that I think you will love:
TM-Town's new uploader allows you to easily drag and drop files from your computer into your web browser. Additionally you can still select files from the file picker using the + Add Files button in the lower left.
When you drag a file into the new uploader the first thing you will need to do is tag that file with between 1 and 3 fields of expertise. Then click the Start Upload button. By the way, you can change the file name just by double clicking on it, changing the text and then hitting enter.
If your resource type (i.e. TM File, Terminology File, Source Document or Target Document) can be automatically detected by TM-Town then that's it. Your file is now being processed and will appear down below.
If your resource type can not be detected automatically you will see something like this after the file uploads:
If your file is a PDF, you will be given the option to import it as a text PDF or use TM-Town's new OCR feature. TM-Town's new OCR feature is available in 47 languages! Just check the "OCR" option and then select the language of your document and its resource type.
TM-Town now also accepts the following file types that will be imported using this OCR technology:
As OCR imports will probably not be perfect and may have unwanted mid-sentence line breaks TM-Town has a tool that lets you quickly and easily clean up your import.
For example, in the above image you can see there are some unwanted line breaks that we can then easily fix. This tool gives you complete control over the final segmentation of your imported document.
With this update I have completely redesigned the alignment tool. You can now see your source and target document side-by-side and make any necessary changes before TM-Town's system aligns your documents.
To start a new alignment first upload both the source and target document. When both documents have finished importing and processing click the pink alignment button in the Source Documents tab.
Next you will be brought to a new screen where you will be asked to choose the target document that you will be aligning that source document with.
After choosing the target document you will be brought to TM-Town's new alignment tool. This tool allows you the ultimate flexibility to completely control how your alignment will turn out.
You will see your source document on the left and your target document on the right. The new GUI gives you various options:
As you make changes the columns will automatically resize so that the height of the source segment is always the same as its corresponding target segment. So all you need to do is make sure that the source segment on the left corresponds to the target segment horizontally to its right. Once you are finished click the Align Documents button at the bottom and that's it! Your new aligned document will appear in Your Work.
This new alignment GUI may not be for everyone though. Some of you may just want a quick and automatic alignment. Don't worry! You can still do that. Just skip to the bottom and click the Align Documents button and your document will be automatically aligned.
If you would like to redact confidential information from your document look for the button with the Eraser icon. TM-Town's confidential information redaction tool is available for documents smaller than 1MB.
It has been about a year since the first lines of code for TM-Town were written. I want to thank all of the great translators who have tried out TM-Town, emailed me, given me feedback and supported me so far. This is just the start! Hopefully you will like this new functionality. Please give me your feedback in the comments section below.
Kevin Dias
TM-Town Developer
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Gabriel Luis-Franchy Spain |
Posted almost 9 years ago. That´s really cool...I wish I had the time to use it! Could you build some process to import patents from the Open Patent Serice by the European Patent Office? If you need some patents-metadata to create the RESTFUL-query I can provide some! |
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Gabriel Luis-Franchy Spain |
Posted almost 9 years ago. http://www.epo.org/searching/free/ops.html |
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Gabriel Luis-Franchy Spain |
Posted almost 9 years ago. WE build an aligner a couple of years ago that might interest you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iK2lnrJ63I |
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Kevin Dias Japan |
Posted almost 9 years ago. Hi Gabriel, thanks for your comments. I'd be curious to talk with you more about importing the patents, sounds interesting. Feel free to send me an email (kevin at tm-town.com). Your aligner looks really cool! Did you release it? What OS is it for? I'd definitely be interested to hear more about it. Nice work! :thumbsup: |
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Shekhar Banerjee India |
Posted over 8 years ago. This is perhaps my first in person experience of conversation with someone in the proz.com. And going by my first impression, I can definitely look forward to a real great future with your august organization. Thanks n' Regards, Shekhar |
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Shekhar Banerjee India |
Posted over 8 years ago. Dear Sir, I am a novice and would need your constant support to become a regular professional worth his name. And I would get the same at times of need is but sure! Thanks for the confidence building affection! Regards, Shekhar |
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Kevin Dias Japan |
Posted over 8 years ago. Hi Shekhar, thanks for the kind words. |
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Elena Italy |
Posted over 8 years ago. Well thank you SOOO much for this tool. Practical and easy, perfect to create and consulting your work/TM/glossaries. :-) |
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