[Freecats-Dev] Open Office & Wordfast integration - asking for a vote

[Henri Chorand]

Hi all,

I believe we might establish a contact with Open Office team. There is 
another reason for this apart from what I stated about their conversion 
filters and spell checking module.

Ideally, and as explained in the specifications document, we translators 
would like to work within a standalone translation-oriented editor, as 
we know it's a good thing to keep document authoring & document 
translation environments separate.

The present state of our project and the present lack of enough 
experienced  developers available make me think we might begin 
otherwise, even if we do remain convinced a standalone translation 
editor would be a good thing and want to keep it as a medium-term goal - 
I spoke about it with Julien and Marilyn and they seem to agree.

I often heard that the user interface part of a software often is the 
one that requires the biggest effort, and I rather agree with it. This 
may not be as much true now that several powerful GUI builders are 
available, but anyway...

So the idea is, would it not be quicker to begin by implementing 
translation client features from within Open Office, in a way similar to 
what Trados and Wordfast do from within MS Word?


I see the following advantages to this approach:

- OO's file conversion filters
As explained before, we badly need OO's conversion filters in order to 
allow translators to be able to work on various file formats. If we work 
from within OO, we don't have to adapt these filters any more, as we can 
use them straight away, from within OO. We "only" need to define our 
working bilingual format differently, by designing custom tags (like 
with Trados, or Wordfast that replicated them) which will be used from 
within OO's Writer format.

- Reduced GUI work (to be confirmed)
If we do so, some work remains to be done. We still need to implement 
the following functions at the client level, this time from within OO:
- establishing connection to a Free CATS server and one of its database
- sending calls to Free CATS server and handling returned data
- parsing source document and inserting custom TU-delimiter tags within it

In order to assess this option, we need to know how easy/difficult it is 
to do the following, in a way compatible with OO API:
- write plug-ins (language, constraints, etc.)
- perform basic parsing/editing functions...
Any experienced MS Word knows that, to do this from within Word, one can 
use a (rightly despised) macro language, and it seems there is yet no 
such all-purpose macro language within OO.
Still, as OO is open source, a developer can have an in-depth knowledge 
of OO's functions and add customized functions, in a way not possible 
with MS Word (far from it).

To me, this looks quite feasible, but I personally lack any knowledge of 
OO internals.

Anyway, if we contact OO team and ask for help, they might like the 
whole idea - in fact, they might find it more attractive than the other 
option, because we would put OO's Writer module at the center of our 
solution.

Please, everybody, especially project team members & developers, let me 
know what you think about it!


Note:
I'm sending this message to all members of Dev. list subscribers, 
including Yves Champollion, Wordfast's developer, which I've recently 
contacted in order to propose him to collaborate on our project.

My original suggestion was to make Wordfast able to work with a Free 
CATS TM server, in order to be able to make use of our server with an 
existing client. I also clearly stated that this collaboration would not 
in any way alter our freedom, as a standalone free software project.

From Free CATS project's point of view, as long as there are not any 
more developers to help, with the actual team, we can reasonably hope to 
have our TM server up and running within next year, thanks to the help 
which the ENSTB engineering school may provide, but I'm not sure we can 
go much further within this time frame.

Yves seems to have liked this idea and quickly saw that his software 
could benefit from this option, but he has not yet provided any clear 
feedback about whether he was willing to contribute to our project. So, 
Yves, fee free to make up your mind, whatever your decision, we'll 
respect it.

As Wordfast is an ethically-priced CAT software, and as it's built by a 
single developer, its position is somewhat different from that of the 
other proprietary CAT tool editors which made us launch Free CATS, and 
this is why I contacted him in the first place. I only want to state the 
following here:
My above suggestion is NOT contradictory to what Yves may, or may not, 
decide to do. Anyway, we do not intend to make a Free CATS plugin for MS 
Word, and if somebody is wondering about the a clear border between our 
project and his software (cooperation versus competition), I think this 
makes it clear enough.

And as with anybody else here, Yves is free to decide whether he wants 
to contribute to Free CATS.

Henri