Uploader and Alignment Redux

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:

• New & redesigned uploader with drag and drop functionality
• New OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology for PDFs or image files in over 40 languages
• New & redesigned alignment tool
• A new "cleaner" that makes it super fast and easy to fix any segmentation or import issues in your document
• And many more smaller enhancements and improvements...

New Uploader

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:

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Technology

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:

• .jpg
• .jpeg
• .tif
• .tiff
• .png
• .gif

Cleaner

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.

New Alignment Tool

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:

• Double click on a segment to edit the text of that segment
• Drag and drop a segment to rearrange its order in the document
• Click the up arrow to merge a segment with the segment above
• Click the down arrow to merge a segment with the segment below
• Click the scissor icon to split a segment into two
• Click the 'x' to delete a segment from the alignment

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.

Confidential Information Redaction

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.

A Final Note

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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