Previewing files
Trados Studio presents source and target text in an abstracted view that relies on context information. See Using context information. However, translators and reviewers often need to inspect the actual document layout. For that reason, a file type plug-in should ideally generate the source document, the target document, or both in the native format.
External previews
Trados Studio can generate a document preview in an external application for almost any supported document format. For example, when users process an Adobe FrameMaker file in Trados Studio and choose the external preview, Trados Studio launches Adobe FrameMaker if it is installed on the machine. If the application is unavailable, Trados Studio cannot open the external preview and displays an error message.
Internal previews
Trados Studio can also host the preview inside the application. In that case, the preview appears in an embedded window. Trados Studio currently supports embedded previews for Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, HTML, and XML.
Internal previews can be static or dynamic. A static preview shows the document, but it does not interact with the side-by-side editor. A dynamic preview stays synchronized with the editor. When users select a segment in the preview, Trados Studio highlights the corresponding segment in the editor, and vice versa. Internal previews usually rely on a display component instead of the native application. For example, Trados Studio uses a Word viewer component to preview Word documents even when Microsoft Word is not installed. The HTML preview uses a web browser component.
A file type plug-in can generate previews for the source document, the target document, or both side by side.
Example
This example shows the internal preview for a Microsoft Word document in Trados Studio. The preview can show the source language, the target language, or both at the same time. The Microsoft Word file type plug-in does not provide a side-by-side preview because that layout uses too much screen space and can affect performance.
