Previously I published a few posts describing how memoQ’s free Language Terminal service could be used to convert Adobe InDesign INDD and IDML files for translation, providing a dynamic preview within memoQ and also generating PDF files from InDesign formats.
Alas, memoQ discontinued that service on February 3, 2025. It’s not yet clear if there is any intention to restore the lost functionality for memoQ users or anyone else. The announcement from the company advises users to request IDML files now, not INDD, as no translation environment tool I’m aware of can import INDD directly now. The IDML format is based on XML and can be imported by many tools, albeit without a preview.
One user contacted me today in great distress over the loss of preview capabilities for IDML in their memoQ projects, so we began investigating alternatives that could at least enable the creation of PDF files from finished or intermediate results in order to check the layout and formatting.
Most of the web pages we found which promised to create PDF from IDML files simply didn’t work with our personal collection of IDML files from past projects.
Then they discovered Scribus, a free, Open Source solution that seems to work well.
It’s a cross-platform tool that runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD and ChromeOS as the screenshot above indicates. And it works for opening all the IDML files I have at my disposal and can export those to make PDF files.
Scribus can also open many other formats, including Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, and Microsoft Publisher.
A PDF of the source file to translate can be used with the memoQ PDF Preview tool to track the context of what you are translating in a separate PDF viewing window, with the current segment text marked by a red box.
At any stage of translating an IDML (or other) file that can be read by Scribus, you can export your work from the translation environment tool and take that intermediate (or completed) file and make a PDF with Scribus, as shown in the video example at the top of this post. This enables you to identify format problems such as bad spacing (which happens often around tags), etc.
This workflow solution of creating PDFs at any stage can be quite helpful. Not all end customers or project managers respond cooperatively to requests for PDFs so that one can see context or check the progress of work and possible errors. Even in situations where that’s not a problem, it’s hard not to like the convenience of not having to bug someone else for a forgotten PDF or for a quick conversion for checking when deadlines loom.
Now that memoQ’s Language Terminal is dead, I will certainly miss being able to deal directly with INDD files myself without investing in an InDesign license. Too often customers send me those files, not understanding that I don’t have InDesign and my working tools (without Language Terminal) can’t deal with it. And I’ll miss those previews in the memoQ preview pane of the working grid a lot.
But the greatest convenience of Language Terminal for me was the ability to generate those PDF files, and this is actually much more convenient (and faster) with Scribus and an IDML file. Having those other formats available for the same kind of checks just makes it even better.
I’ll be exploring Scribus more in the future and write about it on this Substack. In particular, I want to explore it as a format to translate in common translation environment tools.
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