Need tips to pass to LSP unfamiliar with Lingo and Flare

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bwofficer
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Joined: Tue May 12, 2020 2:16 am

Need tips to pass to LSP unfamiliar with Lingo and Flare

Post by bwofficer »

I am transitioning to Flare as my main technical authoring environment.

My main LSP - whom I've given Word files to in the past - uses Trados but has never dealt with Flare files before. We've agreed they'll see if they can do it using output from a dummy Flare project I've created.

I'm a relative novice with Flare. I also have Lingo, though I'm even less experienced with that. So it's a real "blind leading the blind" situation. I'm trying to use Lingo to package up my Flare files into an XLIFF for my LSP. Have any of you got any tips that might help things go smoothly? Any additional tools either of us should be using? Any pitfalls or gotchas to watch out for?

With my first iteration of XLIFF bundle, the LSP said Trados reported some "unhelpful error messages about not finding expected languages". The LSP said it was when they tried opening a snippet file.

For my second iteration, I've simplified the Flare project massively. I converted the snippet to text in the topics and deleted the snippet file. In the Lingo New Project Wizard I filtered down to just the primary target and I set the project to flatten all variables. With no variables, target-specific stuff, or snippets to include in the XLIFF, I have a very simple XLIFF bundle export consisting only of a set of topic files. If that works, I'll start adding back in the reuse features one by one. So at the moment I'm waiting on the LSP having a spare moment to experiment with the bundle. In the meantime I thought it worth asking on here for tips to make the journey go more smoothly.
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