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I really need to export text


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Hi,

I've had this problem a while ago and here it is again.

In the past, I made a couple of catalogues for a client in APub.
Now those catalogues need to be translated.
Translator wants plain text or .doc

Going through every field to copy/paste text is not really an option I would like to resort to. Also it sometimes introduces strange characters into the text.

PLEASE, pretty please, give us text export already!

Thanks and Cheers 

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I do not know if this will solve your immediate need, but if you are using a PC, if you export as a PDF document, you might be able to do a Select All on the contents of the PDF document and then paste into WordPad and then save the text from WordPad as a .txt document.

I find that I often use WordPad or Paint to solve a tricky issue that I do not know how to solve otherwise.

If you are not using a PC maybe someone else will assist you.

William

 

.

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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9 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I do not know if this will solve your immediate need, but if you are using a PC, if you export as a PDF document, you might be able to do a Select All on the contents of the PDF document and then paste into WordPad and then save the text from WordPad as a .txt document.

I find that I often use WordPad or Paint to solve a tricky issue that I do not know how to solve otherwise.

If you are not using a PC maybe someone else will assist you.

William

 

.

 

Sounds good in theory, but does not really work. I tried. copy/pasteing from PDF to either a plain text editor or Wordpad/Word introduces weird characters and linebreaks.
It's better to select from inside Publisher, but that's not only tiresome but also not working perfectly.

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Instead of trying to convert the exported PDF to text yourself perhaps ask the translator if they can work with the PDF. The large professional translation firms are used to dealing with PDF files and have the software to handle them. If you're using a freelance translator or a boutique firm then their capabilities may be different.

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On 12/10/2021 at 4:27 PM, MikeTO said:

Instead of trying to convert the exported PDF to text yourself perhaps ask the translator if they can work with the PDF.

I don't know if this has changed during the very latest years, but PDF is the least appreciated file format for translators. Being a "print" file format, it is not always transferring well when opening in the language tools, and when going back to PDF.

The filters to read and write them are also sometimes an add-on to be paid in addition to the cost of the software. 

Paolo

 

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I am working with these translators for about 20 years now and I am very happy with their work. So I am definitely not changing firms.

As PaoloT rightfully said, PDF is not an appreciated format.

But there's an even bigger reason I need plain text.
I can handle text in German, English and to an extend Spanish.

But translations into languages I don't speak are a different animal.
I need the source text structured in a way, so I can "blindly" copy and paste the translated text without having to be able to read it.

Currently, the catalogues will be translated to Czech and Slovak too, and since I don't know the first thing about those languages, structured plain text is absolutely important.

I would like to hear somebody "official" say something about this.
In my mind, it should be really easy to export text and I wonder why it's not there already?

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1 hour ago, LostInTranslation said:

In my mind, it should be really easy to export text and I wonder why it's not there already?

"Easy" doesn't mean that it is making itself. Someone has to do it, and there are several things missing in Publisher. My guess is that most users are graphic artists in need of a tool to create very simple publications in a single language. Something like posters, menus, leaflets.

At the moment Publisher is not the right tool for multilingual works, since it is missing interchange file format export and can't deal with some sets of languages, notably the RTL ones. There isn't an expected date for these features, so at the moment there is no escape from InDesign.

Paolo

 

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Could ypu possibly make a demonstration .afpub file and upload ot to this thread please?

Not about the real products in the catalogue, just one or two fictional products expressed using fields in the same way, so that there is something to carry out tests on to find out if there is a way to solve the problem.

I suggest this because it is not totally clear to me what is the problem.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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13 minutes ago, William Overington said:

it is not totally clear to me what is the problem

The OP wants to be able to export the text in a story as plain or RTF text, just as we can do from the WritePlus story editor in Serif PagePlus, but Affinity Publisher doesn’t have a story editor.

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3 hours ago, LostInTranslation said:

But translations into languages I don't speak are a different animal.
I need the source text structured in a way, so I can "blindly" copy and paste the translated text without having to be able to read it.

Currently, the catalogues will be translated to Czech and Slovak too, and since I don't know the first thing about those languages, structured plain text is absolutely important.

Just for clarification, do the translators use characters from Unicode to express the text or are they using an old 8-bit format with code pages?

For languages such as Czech and Slovak this could be a significant computing issue if Unicode is not being used.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

... just as we can do from the WritePlus story editor in Serif PagePlus, but Affinity Publisher doesn’t have a story editor.

I didn't know about that. I have not use WritePlus.

4 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The OP wants to be able to export the text in a story as plain or RTF text, just as we can do from the WritePlus story editor in Serif PagePlus, but Affinity Publisher doesn’t have a story editor.

The OP mentions "fields".

It is not clear to me exactly what the OP has done in the original document.

I was musing on whether export to svg without converting text to curves might help, but it possbly may not.

But maybe if we can get into the detail of the problem an answer could be found, though perhaps not.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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 @Alfred just beat me with his answer, that is the OP's and, and mine as well, problem. There is no story editor in Affinity Pubblisher that can export the story as plain or RTF text like PagePlus and InDesign have.

Especially when having to share quite a bit of text for sending to others to work on this would be a very welcome function to have, PDF is just not efficient other than for e.g. poster with a few bits and pieces of text.

@PaoloT An option you could try is to publish to PDF and then use a good OCR program (e.g Abby Finereader or Omnipage) to convert it to a text/wordprocessor file. It may not be perfect but depending on your text and formatting it might be worth a try because they can recognize text blocks in most cases which avoids multi-line paragraphs breaking up into single line paragraphs.

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36 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Could ypu possibly make a demonstration .afpub file and upload ot to this thread please?

Not about the real products in the catalogue, just one or two fictional products expressed using fields in the same way, so that there is something to carry out tests on to find out if there is a way to solve the problem.

I suggest this because it is not totally clear to me what is the problem.

William

 

Here is a sample of the typical layout, two facing pages.
On other pages there might be lots of product images with very little text.

catalogue_sample.afpub

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3 minutes ago, Arte said:

An option you could try is to publish to PDF and then use a good OCR program (e.g Abby Finereader or Omnipage) to convert it to a text/wordprocessor file.

This sounds a lot like a nightmare! :)

There is no need to use OCR, when you have an unprotected PDF from where you can export plain text by just copying & pasting.

Sending text to translators and getting it back – without then having to assemble text in unreadable languages, and reapply all the styles – is another matter. And the only way is to be able to export tagged text, that Publisher can then recognize and reassemble automatically.

Paolo

 

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4 minutes ago, LostInTranslation said:

Here is a sample of the typical layout, two facing pages.

I'm not sure I would have made it this way. You could just have a single flow of text+images, instead of all the separate frames you are using. Is there a reason for using such a strange layout?

Paolo

 

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I am wondering if the best way out of this problem is to offer to pay for the translators to buy Affinity Publisher.

Then the translators could change the text in the fields that contain text but leave the things such as 0.75 mm unchanged.

But even then there could be big problems.

I tried a test.

I copied the line of text decribing the Material of the first product.

Stahlblech verzinkt und beschichtet

So, I used, just as a test to get an idea, Google translate.

I translated it to Czech (though I did also have a look at what it is in English).

The Czech has a z caron character in it, which is  beyond the first 256 characters of Unicode, so a good test.

So I then copied that Czech text (accepting that I do not know the provemance of thar translation, but this is a test) onto the clipboard and tried to get it into the Affinity Publisher document.

Deleting the original text first does not work as the font size is then lost.

So shorten the original to the first letter then paste the Czech text, then remove the first letter of the original.

But I needed to widen the text box too.

Now I am not an expert user of Affinity Publisher but I have some experience with it, and I got it to work

But I did just one field.

However, the translated text was in Unicode. If it had come back in a text file and that text file was using an 8-bit character representation with the Central Euopean code page for the 128 8-bit characters starting with binary 1 there could be big problems.

So the question that occurs to me is that even if you could export the text in a plain text file, when you get the translated plain text file back from the translators in a Unicode plain text file, how do you proceed?

But I suppose that if you have a client who is willing to pay for the time it will take, then fine.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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14 minutes ago, William Overington said:

PLEASE HOLD OFF READING THIS I NEED TO CHECK SOMETHING.

Couldn’t you have cut and pasted the text to somewhere offline for safekeeping, and then pasted it back into your post after checking (and amending if necessary)? :/

 

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24 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Couldn’t you have cut and pasted the text to somewhere offline for safekeeping, and then pasted it back into your post after checking (and amending if necessary)? :/

 

Yes, but it would have had to go into WordPad and I might then have possibly had to go through it removing extra carriage returns, so I did it that way.

The issue was that I had thought that the y acute of the Slovak version was a good test, but I later seemed to remember that its code point in below U+0100 so to be sure I checked it and it was below U+0100 so I redid the test with the Czech version as the Czech version includes a z caron that has a code point above U+00FF and so satisfied the test that I wanted to check.

Puns about the medieval armourer of Prague and the like are expected from the honourable gentleman fromn Scotland.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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1 hour ago, William Overington said:

However, the translated text was in Unicode. If it had come back in a text file and that text file was using an 8-bit character representation with the Central Euopean code page for the 128 8-bit characters starting with binary 1 there could be big problems.

So the question that occurs to me is that even if you could export the text in a plain text file, when you get the translated plain text file back from the translators in a Unicode plain text file, how do you proceed?

 

I've done translations to Czech before and it never was a problem. The translators send Word-files that must be UTF-8 or something.
I can directly copy and paste it to either Publisher or Websites and it works perfectly. (When using it for a website, there's a conversion to HTML-entities happening in the background)

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1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Couldn’t you have cut and pasted the text to somewhere offline for safekeeping, and then pasted it back into your post after checking (and amending if necessary)? :/

 

I a perfect world, yes.

For the very first edition of the catalogues, I get sent a variety of files, ranging from Word to Excel to PDF, along with the images.
So there is no "single source" from the start.
The oldest catalogue has been revised at least 6-7 times since it was first made and before the translation there will be more changes. All the changes happen directly in AP, it would really be overkill to make changes to some source files and then from there to AP.

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5 hours ago, LostInTranslation said:

Here is a sample of the typical layout, two facing pages.
On other pages there might be lots of product images with very little text.

The methods I would use are not going to work here.

The best solution is the one from William.

4 hours ago, William Overington said:

I am wondering if the best way out of this problem is to offer to pay for the translators to buy Affinity Publisher.

 

Catalogues are always going to be a nightmare for translation unless there is pretty much exclusive use of Databases and / or Spreadsheets for the information. The translation would be done in the Spreadsheet and then that would be imported via Data Merge.

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I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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@LostInTranslation@Alfred

Actually, Alfred was writing to me whn he wtote the following.

Nevertheless, the reply from LostInTranslation contains useful information.

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

Couldn’t you have cut and pasted the text to somewhere offline for safekeeping, and then pasted it back into your post after checking (and amending if necessary)? :/

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/154169-i-really-need-to-export-text/&do=findComment&comment=868870

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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5 hours ago, PaoloT said:

I'm not sure I would have made it this way. You could just have a single flow of text+images, instead of all the separate frames you are using. Is there a reason for using such a strange layout?

Paolo

 

You are right. This might have happened, because I exported those two pages as PDF, then reimportet and made the text changes. Actually, the layout should be very neat with textboxes where they make sense.

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4 hours ago, William Overington said:

I am wondering if the best way out of this problem is to offer to pay for the translators to buy Affinity Publisher.

This depends very much on the size of the work. If it is a short work, the translators may be willing to buy a new program and do the work there. If just one of the translators disagrees, the whole process can't be implemented.

If it is a longer work, translators wouldn't accept, because they will not be able to use their professional tools. Language tools allowing for analysis, reuse, glossaries, control, would be out of the process. Maybe they will accept, but they will ask for a higher translation cost, not being able to reuse existing materials.

Paolo

 

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