Replacement/Pre-translation with big list of results

In all search screens, in DGT-OmegaT as well as in standard OmegaT, you can limit the number of matching segments by corresponding up/down box. In standard OmegaT, when you wanted a replacement and then click on "Replace all", only the results which were found during this search are replaced, even if there are other things to replace later in the document.

No idea whenever it was intentional by OmegaT developers, but this can be considered as logical since we want that the user has a look to what the button will do before clicking on "Replace all": only segments the user had a chance to have a look into are replaced. 

But after years, almost inside DGT, this became contre-productive: in order to be sure that the full document is treated, our users selected "Number of matching segments" with a very big value (10000 or even 100000), meaning that all had to be loaded in the results window, and this is also something we wanted to avoid, because this is consuming lot of memory!

To avoid that, in releases 3.4 and 3.5, both our screens "Search and Replace" and "Search and pre-translate" do the following: if the search has been interrupted because we had reached the max number of matches, then "Replace all" will not only replace already found results, but then, immediately propose to do a new search. And if you do so, the new search will start from the point the previous was started: we will not re-include already displayed results, whenever they have finally been replaced or not. Thanks to that, we are sure that if results from the end of the project are not treated, this is because user explicitly required for it (answering "No" to the question), not because the algorithm was wrong.

The alternative option to do a no-display "Replace all" feature is not yet implemented but may be considered as a potential option. Personally I don't like the idea because it means that the user does not have a look to what he is doing, but if it is implemented as configurable, then the user can confirm by the configuration that he explicitly wants such a behaviour and that is correct. Another option may be that the question window has more options (1. do a new search, 2. silently replace all and 3. stop here). This question remains open for discussion.

Add new comment