ABBY text aligner: no VB scripts, no more (Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies) Language Learning Forum

ABBY text aligner: no VB scripts, no more
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Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies

18 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

andras_farkas
Tetraglot
Groupie
Hungary
Joined 4835 days ago
56 posts - 165 votes

Speaks: Hungarian*, Spanish, English, Italian

Message 17 of 18

30 June 2011 at 1:01pm | IP Logged

Faraday wrote:

andras_farkas, thanks for authoring what looks to be a very useful
tool. However, I have not been able to get it to
work. Has anyone successfully run LF Aligner, especially on a mac? (though I have also
tried to get it to work on a PC
as well)

I've gone through the readme several times, and still cannot get any of the input text
on the output xls and txt
files.They simply show up blank, other than the instructions on the output Excel/xls
file. I am using docx files as
input language files. I've installed both AbiWord, and fink/Antiword per the
instructions, but still nothing. If anyone
can shed any light on this, I'd be very grateful.

Well, I don't have a mac so I don't do mac testing, but I do know about a bunch of
users who run the program on a mac without problems
(the conversion of pdf input files doesn't seem to work as well as on a PC, though).
As Doitsujin wrote, doc, docx & other formats need to be converted to txt first, so txt
input files (in UTF-8) are always the safest.
Incidentally, docx conversion doesn't require abiword or antiword so it should be
pretty reliable.
Anyway, this is an odd problem. When things go wrong this badly, the aligner normally
detects it, stops and reports the problem. Here
are some suggestions:
- Run the aligner on the sample files to make sure things work as they should. Files
and instructions are in the "sample" folder.
- Try again with your own files and keep checking where the process goes wrong. Check
the file sizes and segment numbers reported by the
aligner and check the files themselves at various stages. Open the log file
(scripts/log.txt) and post its content here.

Posting the log file is probably the quickest way to get an idea of what's up.

Edited by andras_farkas on 30 June 2011 at 1:03pm
1 person has voted this message useful

andras_farkas
Tetraglot
Groupie
Hungary
Joined 4835 days ago
56 posts - 165 votes

Speaks: Hungarian*, Spanish, English, Italian

Message 18 of 18

30 June 2011 at 1:21pm | IP Logged

Doitsujin wrote:

AFAIK, the tool works internally with UTF-8 files and creates a tab-
delimited text file as the raw output. Any other format will most likely need to be
converted and this additional step might cause problems.

Try saving your files as UTF-8 text files and then try again to align them. BTW, you
get better alignment results if you use a text dictionary with entries delimited with
an at sign (@). For example, an English/German alignment dictionary would have the
following format:

Haus @ house
Maus @ mouse

(The entries need to be in reverse order.)

FYI as of version 2.55, the program contains built-in dictionary data in 32 languages
covering most European languages and Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc.
This covers close to 500 language pairs (dictionaries are generated at runtime as
needed).
I never got around to testing the impact of dictionaries on alignment quality, but they
can't hurt, right?
1 person has voted this message useful

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