Short Cuts – Nº 17: View Project Package and Translation Package Files

Both Transit’s Project Package Files (PPF) and Translation Package Files (TPF) are in compressed format and their content can be viewed with compression utilities like Winzip, WinRAR or 7-Zip. That’s handy if you want to have a look into the file before you receive it with Transit or if you want to check if what you included with the Pack Project or Pack Translation funtions has been correctly packed. Viewing the content of the PPF or TPF files will not affect their functionality, but please do not manually extract from or add files to the PPF or TPF archives, since doing that might produce undesirable results.

To view the content of a PPF or TPF archive, just right click on the file in the Windows file browser and select Open with from the context menu. Choose Winzip or another compression utility from the list of possible applications so as to open the PPF or TPF.

Here’s an example of what a PPF looks like when you open it with Winzip.

Transit Project Package File

And these are the files you can see here:

• .PDF – A PDF representation of the original .DOC file
• .COD – A Transit code file. This file contains the binary data of the original format, in this case the binary data of the .DOC file. The .COD file is needed to be able to export the Transit working files back into the original format.
• .DOC – The original file. As you can see, it is automatically compressed with its path information (and will be automatically uncompressed to the corresponding path when received with Transit).
• .DEU, .ENG – Transit bilingual pairs. These are either the working files or reference files (Transit’s translation memory) which have been included into the PPF. In this case, the files with the path ref\ are the reference files.
• .FFD – The file format definition. This file determines what is editable text and what are tags in the Transit working files.
• .TXE – TermStar dictionaries in a terminology exchange format.
• .PRJ – Transit’s project definition file. This file contains all the project definition parameters.
• .FCK – A format check report. In Transit NXT, formatting check results can be saved into a format check report and this report can be forwarded together with other project files.

Depending on the options the project manager chose when creating the project package file, the PPF might contain more or fewer files, for example segmentation exceptions or different types of extracts (e.g. translation extracts or references extracts). Depending on the selected options, Transit zips all the files automatically into the PPF file. The receiving Transit unpacks all the files into the corresponding folder structure so it is really “Unpack and get going”, as our free webinar with the same name suggests.

Thanks to Karen Ellis for revising this post.

Please note this blog has been moved to a new location, where you will be able to browse it and consult it just like you do now.  Stay tuned!