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Style & formatting

Documents carry formatting — bold and italic runs, links, font sizes, colors — and the editor’s job is to make sure your translation keeps it. Formatting in the editor is not decoration: what you see on a segment is what the rebuilt, delivered file will contain.

How formatting appears in a segment

Section titled “How formatting appears in a segment”

Each cell renders its text with the document’s real inline formatting: bold is bold, a hyperlink is styled as a link, a colored run shows its color, and runs carry the document’s font size and family where they matter. Formatting that has no visual body — bookmarks, comments, subscript/superscript markers, hyperlink targets — is attached to the text invisibly; turn on Show inline style tags in the toolbar to reveal small pills (SUB, SUP, 📌, 💬, 🔗) that mark where those runs sit. Hovering a link’s pill shows its URL.

One deliberate simplification: the document’s overall text color is treated as the baseline and not shown as inline formatting, so a file written entirely in dark gray does not look like every word is color-formatted.

Formatting your translation

Section titled “Formatting your translation”

Select text in a target cell and a floating style toolbar appears:

  • Bold / Italic / Underline — also on Ctrl+B / I / U
  • Strikethrough, Subscript, Superscript
  • Hyperlink — type or paste the URL, apply; the same control removes an existing link
  • Font size — a compact size menu; the button shows the selection’s current size when it has one
  • Clear formatting — strips all inline formatting from the selection

Buttons light up to show which styles the current selection already carries. All changes save automatically like any other edit and participate in undo/redo.

Copying formatting from the source

Section titled “Copying formatting from the source”

Retyping formatting by hand is error-prone, so the editor lets you transfer the source’s exact style runs onto your translation. There are two modes, switched with the paint-roller toggle in the toolbar:

  • Source click (default): select the target words that should carry the formatting, then click the styled run in the source cell. The source run’s full style set — including document-specific details such as exact colors, fonts and sizes — replaces the formatting on your selection.
  • Numbered buttons: with a target selection active, numbered buttons appear over the source cell, one for each distinct style set found in it. Hovering a button highlights everywhere that style set occurs in the source; clicking applies it to your selection. This mode is easier when the source is dense with formatting.

Automatic placement, and re-running it

Section titled “Automatic placement, and re-running it”

When machine translation fills a row whose source has inline formatting, the platform places the formatting onto the translated text automatically. Two affordances exist for when you want to double-check or redo that:

  • Verify styles — with Show inline style tags on, rows that carry visible formatting show a check-circle next to the state dot; click it once you have confirmed the formatting sits on the right words.
  • Re-run inline styles — in the row state menu, re-places the source’s formatting onto the current target text. Use it when placement failed or when a translation arrived as plain text (for example after applying an external suggestion). This uses the project’s AI budget; the editor shows a cost estimate and asks before spending.

Tags in translation

Section titled “Tags in translation”

Software and web content (continuous localization projects) carries inline markup rather than word-processor styling. The editor shows each source tag as a protected, color-coded span; the same tag gets the same color in source and target, so you can see at a glance that your translation still contains every tag. Well-known tags render their meaning (bold, italic, …); unknown tags keep a neutral marker. The tag and placeholder QA checks flag any tag that goes missing or gets malformed — see QA & entities.

When space is limited

Section titled “When space is limited”

Text that lives in a fixed layout — a table cell, a text frame, a callout box — cannot grow forever. For such rows the editor knows the available space and turns the cell’s character counter into a budget (87/112), rendered in the document’s own font so the estimate is honest. As your draft approaches the limit the cell shifts to amber, and past it to red, with a marker line showing where the text stops fitting; the tooltip names what would overflow (“text exceeds the frame”, “the table cell”, …).

The hints are advisory — nothing stops you from saving. Translations that run slightly long can often be absorbed: fixed frames grow into the whitespace around them at delivery, exactly as the preview shows.

Right-to-left targets

Section titled “Right-to-left targets”

RTL target languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Persian) lay out right-to-left automatically, in the editor and in the delivered file. Text is never stored reversed — direction is presentation, handled by the layout engine — and mixed LTR/RTL content inside a segment follows standard bidirectional rules. The preview adds per-element direction controls for RTL documents; see shortcuts & preview.

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