Make special caracter such as ­ and ZWSP visible in the editor

Not just visible, but also searchable, and also make it possible to insert special characters when mass editing strings.

Not being able to see these characters not even when in raw mode means we can’t even find potential issues.

Hello @Meteor0id ,

Thank you for reaching out to Transifex’s community. According to your post, could you please elaborate more on this, by providing an example, in order to understand better your request?

Looking forward to your response.

Kind regards,
Panagiotis

Hi Panagiotis,

If you open the editor on any string of any project and insert a ­ or ZWSP caracter in the translated text, you don’t see this new caracter appear in your translation. It is there, and of you make your web browser window marrow enough you might see the ZWSP or ­ do its work, however when it isn’t word breaking any words it’s invisible.

It is of course supposed to be invisible in the localized resource, however to translators using the editor there should be a way to see and search for these caracters in granslated strings. It should be represented by some symbol or object.

White spaces can be made visible (and imo that should have been enabled by default) but there is nothing yet we can use to see where ZWSP or ­ has been used.

In this screenshot for example notice on the left that ­ is doing its job, but on the right there is no way to tell ­ is being used here.

Hello @Meteor0id ,

Thank you for your detailed response,

I would like to inform you that I have created a ticket for our Product team to look into this.

Just a little insight about what is going on, though… this character is an invisible one, as you already mentioned, and that is why Transifex does not expose it in the editor. However, we understand how this can be confusing, and we will take your feedback into consideration to try and improve this experience for our translators.

In the meantime, you can use either the special character (icon) or the other approach by manually typing the ­ character, and if you want to see it then you can switch to Raw mode.

Maybe, using the “Display spaces” option (check following screenshot) should help, though.
image

Regards,
Panagiotis

The No Break Space is represented by the symbol ⍽, which is equivalent to the Space symbol with arms facing outward.

There’s no symbol for a Narrow No Break Space necessary for proper French typesetting, but “NNBSP” and possibly “EFI” (from French espace fine insécable) could work as an abbreviation.

According to the Wikipedia article, the Soft Hyphen is represented with a parenthesized hyphen.

There’s no symbol for a Zero Width Space, but “ZWSP” is a well-recognized abbreviation.

Hello @haley ,

Thank you for the extra details you shared with us. I believe it will be super helpful for our product team, all this information.
Once I have an update I will keep you posted here.

Kind regards,
Panagiotis

Besides making the &shy visible, I think special attention should go to:

  • making strings with an &shy show up as result when a filtering for a certain text: or translation_text: without including the &shy in the filter
  • warning the translator when preforming bulk actions that there are also partial matches with the &shy character, and that those are not included in the bulk action.
  • allowing to filter specifically on the &shy character to see strings in which it is being used