About Segmentation Rules

Lingo's segmentation rules are based on regular expressions. Therefore, you can use regular expressions in the Segmentation Rule Editor when creating segmentation rules. However, this is purely optional; it is not required that you enter regular expressions in your segmentation rules.

examples

http://www.regular-expressions.info/

http://regexlib.com/CheatSheet.aspx

Note: When using regular expressions in segmentation rules, keep in mind that a period in a rule (e.g., "break after St."; "do not break after St. and before Augustine") may cause unexpected results. This might occur because in regular expressions a period is used to match any character. You can avoid this by always placing a period within square brackets (e.g., "break after St[.]"; "do not break after St[.] and before Augustine") to ensure only the specific character for the period is used.

Note: The following MadCap Flare project files are only segmented based on their units from Flare and not based on regular segmentation rules (periods and other punctuation rules): .liindexmap, .liconceptmap, .flaix, and .flixl files. Therefore, rules from the Segmentation Editor are not applied to these files.

To create basic segmentation rules, start by selecting the Tools ribbon and clicking Segmentation Rules. In the segmentation rules dialog, there are two sections where you can add terms. The section on the left lets you tell Lingo the cases where you do not want segments to break. The section on the right lets you tell Lingo the cases where you do want segments to break.

Segmentation rules can be especially useful for abbreviations and other terms that may contain periods (or other punctuation) that Lingo usually recognizes as the end of a sentence.

You can also create advanced segmentation rules. Advanced segmentation rules allow you to override or edit Lingo's default segmentation rules and to set segmentation rules for specific languages.

To create advanced segmentation rules, start by selecting the Tools ribbon and clicking Segmentation Rules, then click Advanced. Two new tabs appear in the editor: Rules and Languages.

If you want to return to the basic editor, click Basic.

Note: If you return to the basic editor, the rules you created in the advanced editor remain active but are hidden. If you create new rules in the basic editor, they are added to the user-defined rule set the next time you open the advanced editor.

Following are some additional points to keep in mind when working with segmentation rules:

• When creating segmentation rules, keep in mind that you may need to enter spaces (or you can enter \s if using a regular expression) where necessary (see examples below). Depending on the circumstance, a space may need to be added after the last word in the After column, or it may need to be added before the first word in the Before column. The reason for this is that content structures and languages are different. An expert knowledge of regular expressions may help to remove the guessing from this task.
• There may be times when you create a rule on the left side of the editor (do not break) that conflicts with another rule on the right side (break). In that case, the do not break rule overrides the break rule.

• You can restore Lingo's segmentation rules to their default settings (i.e., clear all custom rules). To do this, click Restore Default.

  

• Segmentation rules are not tied to the project. They are external and are stored in Documents\LingoSRX. Therefore, all Lingo projects that you create can use the same rules.
• There are certain default segmentation rules in place (e.g., when Lingo comes across Dr., it does not break the segment). However, you can create custom rules, which will overwrite the default rules when conflicts exist.
• User-defined rules are applied to all languages.
• When working in the advanced editor, if you add a rule to a language that has multiple language dialects (e.g., English has dialects for countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom), the rule will be applied to each dialect in that language. However, if you add a rule to a language's dialect, the rule is not applied to any other dialect in that language or to the top-level language (e.g., if you add a rule to English (Ireland), it is not applied to English (Jamaica) or English).

• You can sort the rules by clicking the column headings.

  

• You can resize the columns by clicking the divider between the column headings and dragging to the left or right.

  

• Custom segmentation rules do not work on SDLXIFF, TTX, and TXML files, because these files should be segmented already by other tools before they are imported.

Following are some examples of how you might create segmentation rules:

example—do not break

Let's say you import a Word document and the segments look like this in the Translation Editor:

Notice that the first two rows should be joined into a single segment, and the final three rows should be joined together as well.

To accomplish this with segmentation rules, you can do the following:

With these rules in place, you can update the project and the segments will look like this:

example—break

Let's say you import a Word document and the segments look like this in the Translation Editor:

This is a situation where you want the first segment to remain as it is, but you need the second segment to break after Dr. You can do this manually by splitting the segment, or you can do it automatically by creating a segmentation rule like the following:

With this rule in place, you can update the project and the segments will look like this:

example—do not break (using regular expressions)

Let's say you import a Word document and the segments look like this in the Translation Editor:

To correct these breaks, you can create a segmentation rule like this:

With this rule in place, you can update the project and the segments will look like this:

We can edit the rule so that Lingo does not break segments when Vol. or vol. is followed by a number. But if it is followed by a character, it will break. To accomplish this, we can edit the segmentation rule as shown here:

The modified rule tells Lingo to avoid breaking a segment when it finds Vol. or vol. followed by a number, including occasions when a space exists before the number. With this rule altered, you can update the project and the segments will look like this:

Note: You can use regular expressions with either basic or advanced segmentation rules. However, you may choose to use an advanced segmentation rule if you want to set a rule for a specific language rather than for all languages.