Prepare Across for the translation of Help & Manual Projects
While the Product documentation for Help & Manual provides a comprehensive set of instructions for the translation, the instructions in the product documentation are more geared towards the actual workflow and not so much towards the more technical aspects of the translation with Across itself. While this makes perfect sense for the product documentation of Help & Manual, this lack of information could potentially negate the effect of the efficiencies within the actual workflow. The instructions in this document describe the recommended preparatory steps to be taken prior to translating Help & Manual projects with Across.
Preparing Across
Following you will find a detailed description on the preparatory steps, that should to be taken in Across prior to starting the Translation of a Help & Manual project.
Adding a File Extension
| Proceed as follows:
1. Open Across. 2. Select System Settings in the Tools menu to open the dialog with the same name. 3. Under Document settings select Document associations in the left pane of this dialog. 4. Select in the right pane in the area Document associations the option Tagged XML (*.xml) in the Document Type dropdown list. 5. Click Add to open the Document associations (add) dialog. 6. Enter the Extension and the Name and Description and other information in this dialog, as shown in the following example. 
7. Click OK to close the dialog and add the the file type extension to Across. |
Caution You must enter a period before entering the file type extension. Creating a DST File
| A DST (Document Settings Template) file is basically a collection of all XML elements and attributes based on a XML file, a DTD file or a schema file. It is used to specify the Elements which are to be translated/not translated. Following you will find the instructions on how to create a DST file for the translation of Help & Manual project files. For this particular example a the Project file for the Help & Manual online help was used.Proceed as follows:
1. Open Across. 2. Select System Settings in the Tools menu to open the dialog with the same name. 3. Under Document settings select Tagged XML in the left pane of this dialog. 4. Click Add in the area Tagged XML in the right pane. 5. The dialog New Template will open. 6. Enter the desired name for the template and click OK to close the dialog. 7. The template is now selected and you can enter a description in the Description field. 8. Click Load in the Customize Tagged XML Settings area. 9. Navigate to the location, where the Help & Manual project file is located and select the file. All Elements will be added and can now be properly processed with Across. See the following screenshot as example.  10. Export the file to a location of your choice to have a backup copy. |
Importing a DST file into Across
If the translator has been provided with a DST file, the file just needs to be imported into Across to be used.
Proceed as follows: 1. Open Across. 2. Select System Settings in the Tools menu to open the dialog with the same name. 3. Highlight Tagged XML in the left pane of the dialog. 4. Click Import in the area Tagged XML in the right upper pane of the dialog. 5. In the Open dialog, navigate to the location with the DST file. 6. Select the file and click Open to import the file. The file is now available to be used with Across translation projects. |
Note While having the DST file in itself will help considerably in regards to the actual translation, it is recommended (if not done already) to also add the file type as described above in order to make the translation process as efficient as possible. Translating with across
After adding the DST file and the file extension
After adding the file type and the DST file, Across will properly recognize the file type and process them as normal. The following screen shots were taken during the addition of the Help & Manual online help project file to a translation project for Across.
 The file selection dialog in the project setup The selected file in the source file selection dialog in the project setup The template which is based on the DST file created |
