Translator

Translator action tasks can convert your data from its current encoding to a different encoding. The same data may be converted back and forth as required.

The Translator action task is useful for data files using foreign languages, as well as to convert Unicode data files so that they can be manipulated within Workflow.
Note that if Workflow's only job is to pass the data file to a task, there's no need to convert the data file. The OL Connect Server does support Unicode data files.

Codepage 1252 (ANSI - Latin 1) is used for many Latin language documents, since it can be used for Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili and Swedish.
Codepage 932 is often used for Japanese.

Note: You can create your own translation matrix files for the Translation action task by adding them to the following folder:
%COMMONPROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Objectif Lune\PlanetPress Workflow 8\Plugins\Translator
Two examples are already present, converting ASCII to and from IBMEBCDIC.

Input

Any text-based data file.

Processing

The characters in the data file are converted from the old encoding to the new one.

Output

The data file in its new encoding format. Metadata, Job Info variables and other variables are unchanged.

Task properties

General Tab

• Source encoding: Select the current data encoding. Note that the source encoding is not selected automatically and you must therefore select the proper encoding from this list in order for the conversion process to be performed successfully.
• Target encoding: Select the encoding to which you want the data to be converted.
• Include target encoding signature: This option is only available when converting to UTF-8 (Windows code page 65001) or UCS-4 (code page 12000 or 12001). Select to include the character encoding signature—also known as the byte order mark—at the beginning of the target string.
• Default character on translation: You may enter a character to be used to replace all those characters that cannot be found in the source encoding. If you leave this box empty, they will be simply stripped from the data, so you may consider using a space as a place holder for unidentified characters.

On Error Tab

For a description of the options on the On Error tab see Using the On Error tab.

Miscellaneous Tab

The Miscellaneous tab is common to all tasks.

It contains a text area (Task comments) that lets you write comments about the task. These comments are saved when the dialog is closed with the OK button and are displayed in The Task Comments Pane.

Check the option Use as step description to display the text next to the icon of the plugin in the Process area.

The tab also provides an option to highlight the task in The Process area with the default color, set in the Preferences (see Colors), or the color selected or defined under Highlight color on this tab.
To revert the selected highlight color to the default color, open this tab, turn the Highlight option off and close the dialog with the OK button; then turn highlighting back on.
Highlighting can also be turned on and off via the task's contextual menu and with the Highlight button on the View ribbon.