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E-Book Editing

 

SCENARIO

An ebook editor-in-chief is working on a foreign language masterpiece with 120 long chapters. In the .xhtml files he received from a content vendor, his editorial staff has identified 3,000+ distinguished global errors ranging from single corrupted characters and incorrect formatting codes to incorrect text of all sorts and all lengths. The editorial staff has worked out a correction for each error, and has listed these 3,000+ error-correction text pairs in a spreadsheet. The task now is to implement these corrections globally, which means performing a global find-replace action for each of the 3,000+ errors in all 120 chapters, or to repeat the find-replace operation a total of 360,000+ times. Assuming a speed of 30 seconds per action using the text editor’s built-in find and replace-all feature, it will take 3,000+ work hours, or more than a year and four months for one person, to implement all corrections by manual operation.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to complete the global find-replace operations for all 3,000+ errors, in all 120 .xhtml files, in less than an hour.

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Image Processing

 

SCENARIO

A web producer receives a folder of hundreds of images that come in different orientations and diversified dimensions. Since the website requires that images be uploaded at fixed dimensions, he needs to pick out all the images with both dimensions equal to or larger than the required dimensions, then edit them to the required dimensions in such manner that both cropped image areas and image quality loss are kept to a minimum. He estimates that it will take him several days to complete the task by manual operation using generic tools such as PhotoShop.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to process the folder: images with compatible original dimension sizes will be moved to a separate folder; remaining images will first be cropped to the largest possible dimensions with the dimension ratio matching that of the required dimensions, then scaled down to the desired dimensions. The operation will be complete in a few minutes.

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Text Excerption

 

SCENARIO

A content manager has a folder of 150 text files exported from a content database, one file for each record. He needs to excerpt four particular paragraphs from each file and organize these excerpts into a spreadsheet for further processing. Since these paragraphs are spread all over the file, if he is to do this manually, he will have to copy-paste a total of 600 times, accompanied by scrolling up and down each time. This is estimated to take about two hours, and is expected to be error-prone.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to excerpt the four object paragraphs from all 150 files, and organize them into a new spreadsheet in less than two minutes.

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File Slicing/Conversion

 

SCENARIO

A localization producer has a master spreadsheet of 20,000+ UI keys and values in 35 languages that she needs to import into a database. The problem is, the database takes only CSV files containing no more than 100 keys. She therefore needs to slice the master spreadsheet into 200+ small files each containing 100 keys or less. To do this manually she will need to repeat the following operations 200+ times: create a new spreadsheet file, copy a different block of 100 keys from the master spreadsheet, paste it into the new spreadsheet, and export the content of the new file to a CRV file. This repetitive operation won’t be smooth because of its large volume of memory use. She estimates that it will take her 4 hours or longer to complete.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to chop the master spreadsheet into 200+ small files, each containing 100 different keys, and export each of them into a CSV file, in a total of less than 10 minutes.

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Email Localization QA

 

SCENARIO

An e-commerce localization QA manager has 40 web email files in plain text format, each in a different language translated from a single English source text which contains four particular parameters, each occurring a particular number of times. She needs to quickly verify that all four parameters are intact and that each occurs the correct number of times in each file. The routine way for her to do this is to send these files out to a localization vendor where each email is verified by a linguist of the local language. Unfortunately, none of their vendors has linguists for all 40 languages available at the time.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to read all the emails, and a report that lists the number of occurrences of each parameter in each file, with any file that contains incorrect number of any of the parameters highlighted, will be generated in 15 seconds.