XTM Visual mode (Visual Editor) – most common issues & troubleshooting

Owned by Damian Rozmiarkowski (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 11, 2024 by Damian Rozmiarkowski
5 min read

Introduction

Below are the most common problems clients report in tickets concerning XTM Visual mode in XTM Workbench.

Before reading the article, we recommend that you read this article, to find out more about translating in XTM Visual mode: How to translate in XTM Visual Mode.

Issue description & Solution

InDesign font is squeezed or malformed

Solution: This often occurs when no font files are uploaded in Preview Files after the project creation stage. To correct this, follow the steps below:

  1. Upload font files in the Preview Files section of your Project editor → General info page and Save the changes.

  1. If the step above does not improve the display, create a suitable ticket for the XTM International Support team and send your fonts along with your request.

IMPORTANT!

Note that all adjustments to XTM Visual Mode will be displayed in a new project. In old projects, due to the way XTM Visual mode works, only the displayed target content will be changed. The source part will remain unchanged until the project is reanalyzed.

Fonts in the preview and XTM Visual mode are malformed for Chinese/Japanese/Korean languages in an IDML file

Solution: If the font is malformed, in the case of Chinese, Japanese or Korean, this most likely means that your source document contains a font that does not support those languages. In such a case, create an XTM International Support ticket and send us your IDML file, in which the fonts you require for a particular language are used. We will extract language data from such files and perform remapping.

XTM Visual mode is not being displayed for DITA/XML files

Solution: If you are r uploading DITA/XML files for the first time, you are likely to have XTM Visual mode disabled for those files. In such a case, send a ticket to the XTM International Support team requesting the enabling of XTM Visual Mode for the specified file extensions.

IMPORTANT!

Also note that if you have previously requested XTM Visual Mode for DITA or XML files with specific root nodes, then, if you add files with a different root node, the Support team will have to alter your XTM Visual Mode configuration once again to make it work.

Images are not displayed in XTM Visual Mode

Solution: When uploading files to the Preview files section, make sure that:

  • They are in one of the permitted formats: JPG, GIF, PNG, SVG;

  • They are properly referenced in the source document (e.g. in DITA, src="images/text_picture.jpg" means that you have to upload a zipped images folder with text_picture.jpg in it);

  • Images are zipped and their total size does not exceed 150MB.

  • Paths in the source file and the path in the preview files folder are the same.

    • To display the Links panel, choose Window → Links in InDesign. Each linked file and automatically embedded file is identified by name. If you click on a particular graphic, you will display the Link info: name for it in the Links panel.

    • Alternatively, you could open XTM Visual mode → (right-click on it) → Inspect → find the image that is not displayed and try to read its name in the Elements tab. Beware that there might be some special characters that will be encoded differently.

    • Once you have found out the missing file's name, you can check if it was sent in the Preview files. If it was, you can also unpack your IDML source file, open Notepad++ and use the Find in files feature to search for the file's name (or part of it). Perhaps there is some minor difference between the name in preview and name in the source file.

As far as InDesign files are concerned, to display their images properly in XTM Visual mode and in preview files, you also need to upload relevant files in the Preview Files section in the project's general information tab. See Uploading preview files for InDesign projects to learn all the prerequisites.

Some parts of the text in XTM Visual Mode are not clickable

Solution: Due to security reasons, XTM Cloud is blocking content that, mainly in HTML source files, is linked to a JavaScript code. Check if your source file contains JavaScript code or is referring to an external sheet (which is in most cases uploaded in preview files). If so, consider deleting it or altering the document before submitting it as an XTM Cloud project.

Difference in content between source file and XTM Visual Mode

Solution: Keep in mind that XTM Visual mode aims to be a 1:1 representation of the source document. If some parts of the document are not visible in the file (e.g. attributes in the HTML source, InDesign style nodes or alternate content in a DOCX file), it will not be displayed in XTM Visual mode.

Also, if you requested some ITS configurations, parts that have been blocked from or exposed to translation in that way will not be available in XTM Visual mode.

Source and target is misaligned in XTM Visual Mode

Solution: This issue mostly occurs in InDesign. Apply the following method to resolve the problem.

The page does not change due to InDesign moving the segment to another page. It probably occurs because there is not enough space to contain this node on the current page. However, the segment remains on the same page for source preview so it is not changed.

In this situation, to change the page, you can unlink the source from the target by clicking the button next to the option to change page: