What is +Tools?

+Tools (PlusTools) has two functions:

1. +Tools is a Translation Memory & glossary editor for the translation industry.
It supports the Wordfast TXT format, as well as Oasis TMX / TBX formats. Very large files are supported.
Wordfast Server (WFS) TMs and glossaries are also supported through the HTTP protocol, even while they are in use by WFS, which is crucial in most workflows.
2. +Tools is also a Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tool that currently handles Microsoft DOCX Word files, and XLIFF.
   If that's your primary use, jump to the relevant section.

Translation Memory & glossary editor for the translation industry.

Powerful utilities are available:

• Filtering: used to isolate TUs on certain conditions.
• TM cleanup: used to detect and/or remove suspected faulty units based on a rich set of conditions.
• TM optimization: A filter is provided to spot and remove redundant TUs.
  To delete redundant TUs from a very large TM (for example, over 2 million TUs, and up to 10 million TUs), a command-line utility, TMSort.exe, is provided on request.
• Anonymization: Anonymize TMs with a smart obfuscation of sensitive information, still retaining linguistic & grammatical integrity.
• Export/Import: PlusTools can export data to various formats, for example to train MT engines, or import data from various formats..

The list of features is constanty growing. Alignment and term extraction are in preparation

Note: +Tools is currenty in beta stage, and free, use at your own risk.

Quick start

Click here for the installer.

The browser paradigm is used, so you don't need to learn yet another User Interface.
Data is presented in a spreadsheet way. The F2 key toggles between source/target view (2-column), or all fields. Click a + symbol to add a tab, a x symbol to close a tab. +Tools can open up to 5 tabs.

Who, why

Essential actions and shortcuts

The clipboard is just another file named clipboard.tmp, and survives closing/opening +Tools. The clipboard can be opened as any other file. As with most clipboards, every Copy action rewrites it.

Action time! A few examples

I want to filter some lines, then copy or delete them.

1. Hamburger menu ☰ > Filter (or Ctrl+L). Choose & set a filter, apply it.
2. Now, only lines that pass the filter are visible, and "selected", shown against a blue background.
   Spacebar: unselect a line, Ctrl+A: select all; Ctrl+B: unselect all; Ctrl+R: reverse-select all.
3. You can now use:
   Ctrl+C ("Copy") to copy selected & filtered lines to the clipboard, or
   Ctrl+Del to delete them from the file.

I want to add clipboard content to some file.

Spot and remove suspected garbage from my TM

1. Hamburger menu ☰ > Filter > Suspicious. Set the conditions, apply.
2. Now, only lines that may be faulty, or unwanted, are visible. They are all "selected".
   Spacebar: unselect a line, Ctrl+A: select all; Ctrl+B: unselect all; Ctrl+R: reverse-select all.
3. Use Ctrl+C ("Copy") to copy selected & filtered lines to the clipboard, or
   Use Ctrl+Del to delete them from the file.
   Note that a "stopword" approach is also used, which is a linguistic category (not statistical, as other approaches). With segments of over X words (typically, X>=7), the absence of any>stopword can reveal two crucial symptoms: A. Wrong language; B. Gibberish.

Spot and remove redundant lines (TUs, or entries) from my TM or glossary

1. Hamburger menu ☰ > Filter > Redundant. Set the conditions, apply.
2. Now only redundant lines are visible, and "selected", in groups of siblings (redundant lines).
   Spacebar: unselect a line, Ctrl+A: select all; Ctrl+B: unselect all; Ctrl+R: reverse-select all.
3. Use Ctrl+Del to delete filtered & selected lines from the TM.

Note:

• +Tools lets you select if the unselected line (the one chosen to survive deletion with Ctrl+Delete) is the youngest, or oldest, in the series of siblings. Note that a custom filter can also be used to identify that one "surviving" line. In the Custom filter, two options (Is in List, or Is not in List) are specially geared toward that task. For example, you can opt for one particular User ID, or a list of those, to be preferred, or avoided, in determining the one surviving line. Simply enter a list of User IDs, separated with commas, as argument.
• When you press Ctrl+Delete, all selected lines are deleted (except the one, per group of siblings, which is not selected).
• Lines are presented in a sorted display, so that siblings (groups of redundant lines) are listed together. Note that the TM or glossary is not actually sorted, this is only a visual thing.

Anonymize the TM to prevent confidentiality issues

1. Hamburger menu ☰ > Settings > Anonymization. Set the conditions, apply.
2. Hamburger menu ☰ > Reorganize. Check "Anonymize", reorganize.

Note:

• +Tools can use a list of names to be replaced with anonymous placeholders.
  In the list, if a name ends with an equal sign =, whatever comes after will replace that name; otherwise, a random placeholder will be used. Placeholders are chosen to make linguistic sense, so that, if applicable, Machine Translation can recognize obfuscated items as names, rather than things. Note that for a name to be replaced, it must begin with a capital letter in the TM, or be all in capitals
• Email addresses and URLs can also be obfuscated.
• Figures can be obfuscated. If that is the case, +Tools intelligently treats figures. For example, dates are handled to remain valid as dates after obfuscation. This is important for MT training.

Globally replace Foobar with Barfoo in my file

1. Press Ctrl+H (a popular shortcut for "Replace"), or click the  ...  icon next to the search bar.
2. Enter Foobar under Find:     enter Barfoo under Replace with:
3. Click "Replace"

Globally replace a language code with another one

1. Press Ctrl+H (a popular shortcut for "Replace"), or click the  ...  icon next to the search bar.
2. Set up to find the existing language code, to replace with the new language code.
3. Select the appropriate language code (source or target) in the list fields.
4. Click "Replace"

I want to append a TM/glossary to my current TM/glossary

1. Hamburger menu ☰ > Filter > Append.

I want to append the clipboard to my TM (or glossary)

1. Press Ctrl+V (the universal shortcut for "Paste")

How many lines, TM TUs / Glo entries, are in my file?

1. Press F5 (a popular shortcut for "recalculate")

Note: the clipboard is just another file, and can be viewed as either a TM, or a glossary.

Note: Paste/Append between an XML-based format (TMX, TBX) and Wordfast Classic TXT:
This is possible from TXT to XML. From XML to TXT, only the donor XML units with two language codes that match those of the recipient TXT file will be copied. If you work across TMs and glossaries whose language codes are not compatible, be aware that copying data must respect language codes.

WFS TMs and Glossaries

To connect to WFS TMs and glossaries, note that the HTTP mode is used. Make sure your version of WFS is 1.14.42.247, or higher. If that is not the case, just download WFS from https://www.wordfast.net/zip/WfServer.zip.
Note that WFS is free for up to three simultaneous connections. If you see the red "demo" mode flashing in WFS, but you have under 4 connections, WFS is actually working in full mode.
Recent versions of Wordfast Server are compatible with the standard REST interface model used by +Tools.

Under Setup > Network, check the Port HTTP Active checkbox. Make sure the computer where WfServer runs has the port 81 opened (or any other port you set up).

In the "Account" tab in WFS, you must check the "Allow raw calls" checkbox. It is also important that the Account (and TM as well) do not restrict access, and do not use encryption. A version of +Tools that supports encrypted mode is in preparation.

When the above is set and secured, +Tools can "talk" to WFS.

The HTTPS protocol is in preparation.
Use as localhost, or in a LAN, but avoid WAN (Web) connections if confidentiality is a must.

  WfServer 1.14.42.247   port: 47110

–oX

TMs

Glossaries

Accounts

Users

Groups

Activity

Sessions

Setup

General  Network  TMs  Gloss  Accounts  Users  Groups  Activity  Setup  Network   Port WF#       LAN IP           Port HTTP#  ☑ Active WAN IP ☑         SysLog   Syslog server    Enabled         Email alerts  Authent email    Passw SMTP server     Enabled Send email to

A connection string is the same as with WF Pro, Wf Anywhere, except that the wf:// part (the native WFS protocol) is replaced with http:// as follows:

http://accountName:passWord@11.12.13.14:81

wf://accountName:passWord@11.12.13.14:81

• accountName is the name of an account as defined in WFS;
• passWord is the password for that account as defined in WFS;
• 11.12.13.14 is the IP number to reach WFS;
• 81 is the port as defined in WFS Setup > Network > HTTP Port.

For WFS "locally" running in the same machine as +Tools, the IP number would be 127.0.0.1

The TM and Account (defined under TM or Account should not restrict, nor encrypt access. A version of +Tools that supports encrypted mode is in preparation.

Searching in a Wordfast Server TM

Press Ctrl+F for a quick-and-easy "full file" search mode. Ctrl+F searches the entire database (source and target segments, dates, all meta data).

Note that Concordance ( ☰ Hambuger menu > Filter, or Ctrl+L) is different, as it works as a filter, only displaying TUs that contain all, or any of, the keyword(s) being searched.

With Wordfast Server, Concordance uses the TM's index, so it's much faster than the "brute force", regular search. TUs that pass the Concordance search in WFS are sorted, with those containing multiple words - the more relevant ones - on top. Concordance only retrieves up to one megabyte of text, which is still a few thousand TUs. If you search for very common words (like and or the), you may reach that maximum. But Concordance is typically used to spot real words, usually rare or peculiar ones, not frequent "stopwords".

+Tools service files

Clipboard.tmp contains any data you wrote into the clipboard with Ctrl+C. It can be deleted. It can also be opened by +Tools as any other file. Which means that you can first apply a filter, press Ctrl+C to copy filtered lines into the clipboard, open the clipboard, repeat the operation to drill down a file with successive filters.
This shows the versatility in +Tools: you can apply successive layers of custom and/or preset filters to virtually extract whatever you want from a file.

A file that ends with EXPORT.txt contains data exported with a custom export.

A FLT file (a file with a .flt extension) is a temporary file that contains the data found when applying a filter.
FLT files can be deleted; they will recreated by +Tools when the need occurs.

A BAK file is a backup of a file before a complete rewrite. A Search-replace operation, or a reorganization, entirely rewrites a file. Bak files can be deleted.

+Tools as a CAT tool

This is at beta stage, although already usable, and used by some.

+Tools is designed as a possible successor to Wordfast Classic, in case VBA disappears.

What are the differences between Wordfast Classic and +Tools?

+Tools does not require Microsoft Word.
This is why you will see those red critters, so-called <1>tags<2>, inside opened segments.
At this early stage, +Tools implements a strict one-to-one tag verification, source to target. Flexibility will be introduced for advanced use, allowing custom tags.

Other than that, you will find the simplicity that made Wordfast Classic (WFC) a success from the year 1999 onward.

The WFC format for TMs and glossaries is used. If +Tools finds a pre-existing Wordfast Classic setup (for example, wordfast.ini), it uses it.

What is the main difference between +Tools and other CAT tools?

• +Tools is currently limited to the Microsoft Word DOCX file format, and TXLF. It may open up to other formats (the Microsoft Office Suite, the Open Office suite, and any XML-based file format) because its foundation is XML.
  Remember that Microsoft Word opens/saves the PDF format.
• +Tools is extremely lightweight and portable, almost 1,000 times smaller than other translation tools: 250 kB zipped. Yes, k as kilo, not mega. It's a single executable, no dependencies, no DLLs.
  It has no protection scheme while in beta. That being said, size is not +Tools' defining factor, function is. +Tools is lightning fast and fully equipped.
  The hassle-free setup lets you start in a few seconds.
  Power users can opt for a more sophisticated setup, which resembles the one in WFC.
• +Tools is simple - the translator should not feel like flying a jet. To achieve that simplicity, and despite its size, +Tools packs enormous complexity under the hood:
  1. A full-fledged, two-way document converter/filter;
  2. a segmenter;
  3. XLIFF support;
  4. a lightning fast and potent Translation Memory + Terminology database engine;
  5. a capacity to connect to most Machine Translation sources, with built-in APIs to use MT from Google, Microsoft, deepL, WorldLingo, MyMemory, Yandex & more;
  6. a QA checker (still in development); spell-check support;
  7. a powerful translation editor, complete with terminology recognition, AutoSuggest, and more.
  8. a complete TM/Terminology database browser/editor/maintainer, unlimited in file size, that most competitors lack.

+Tools has been patiently coded from scratch, instruction after instruction, to avoid an assemblage of bulky third-party libraries.

Start up +Tools, you're instantly productive. The hassle-free setup lets you start in a few seconds.

Does +Tools need the internet; is it a cloud application?

No. We have a cloud solution, another tool called Wordfast Anywhere. +Tools does not need the internet to run, unless you set it up to query Machine Translation (MT) from a web source - but that is optional. An even if you need web-based MT, +Tools offers a one-click offline mode: pre-MT the entire document in a minute, and the MT results are locally stored. From that point on, you can work totally offline for days with MT support.

Can +Tools be integrated in an existing TMS or workflow?

It looks like +Tools is based on XLIFF. Can I translate XLIFF files from other tools, like Wordfast Pro, MemoQ, Trados, etc?

That is intended. However, as long as +Tools is in beta stage, 100% compatibility cannot be guaranteed. TXLF (Wordfast Pro's XLIFF) is currently suppported with good results.

If you translate XLIFF, chances are, you are not directly working for a client, you are subcontracting for a translation agency. Use their recommended translation tool.

Appendix 1: Accessing data through HTTP.

Credits

All trademarks noted™ are the property of their respective owners.
Ms-Word™, Excel™, Access™, PowerPoint™ are trademarks of Microsoft Corp.