Replace curly quotes with straight quotes

Text transforms are a special type of QuickLauncher prompt that performs local find-and-replace operations on the active target segment – instantly, without calling an AI provider.

When to use text transforms

Text transforms are useful for cleaning up invisible or problematic characters in your translations. For example:

• InDesign (IDML) forced line breaks – InDesign uses invisible Unicode LINE SEPARATOR (U+2028) characters as forced line breaks (Shift+Enter). These are invisible in Trados but can cause problems in your translations.
• Zero-width spaces and joiners – invisible characters from PDF or web sources
• Normalising quotes or dashes – replacing curly quotes with straight quotes, or em dashes with en dashes

How it works

1. Navigate to the segment you want to clean
2. Press Ctrl+Q (or right-click → QuickLauncher)
3. Open the Text operations folder
4. Click Strip U+2028 (or another transform)

The transform runs instantly. A dialogue confirms how many replacements were made, and the cleaned text is copied to your clipboard.

Note

Text transforms modify the target segment only. The source segment is never changed.

Built-in transforms

Supervertaler ships with one built-in text transform:

Strip U+2028

Removes invisible Unicode LINE SEPARATOR (U+2028) and PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR (U+2029) characters from the target segment, replacing them with spaces. Consecutive spaces are collapsed to a single space.

These characters are commonly inserted by InDesign (IDML) as forced line breaks (Shift+Enter). They are invisible in the Trados editor but can corrupt translations – the AI may produce spurious line breaks, or the characters may cause formatting issues in the final document.

Creating your own transforms

Text transforms are stored as .md files in your prompt library, just like regular prompts. The only difference is the YAML frontmatter has type: transform instead of type: prompt, and the content body contains find/replace rules instead of a prompt.

Step by step

1. Open Settings → Prompts
2. Click New
3. Set the Category to QuickLauncher/Text operations (or any QuickLauncher subfolder)
4. In the YAML frontmatter, change type: prompt to type: transform
5. In the content body, write your find/replace rules

Rule format

Each rule is a find: / replace: pair. Blank lines between rules are optional but improve readability. Lines starting with # are comments.

find: "\u201C"
replace: "\u0022"

find: "\u201D"
replace: "\u0022"

Unicode escapes

Use \uXXXX to specify Unicode characters by their code point. This is essential for invisible characters that cannot be typed or seen in a text editor.

Escape	Character	Description
\u2028	(invisible)	LINE SEPARATOR – InDesign forced line break
\u2029	(invisible)	PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR
\u200B	(invisible)	ZERO WIDTH SPACE
\u200C	(invisible)	ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
\u200D	(invisible)	ZERO WIDTH JOINER
\uFEFF	(invisible)	BYTE ORDER MARK (BOM)
\u00A0	(invisible)	NON-BREAKING SPACE
\u201C	”	LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
\u201D	”	RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK

Example: Strip U+2028 (built-in)

---
type: transform
name: "Strip U+2028"
description: "Removes invisible Unicode LINE SEPARATOR and PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR"
category: "QuickLauncher/Text operations"
default: true
---

# Strip invisible Unicode line/paragraph separators.
# These are commonly inserted by InDesign (IDML) as forced line breaks.

find: "\u2028"
replace: " "

find: "\u2029"
replace: " "

Example: Normalise non-breaking spaces

---
type: transform
name: "Fix non-breaking spaces"
description: "Replaces non-breaking spaces with regular spaces"
category: "QuickLauncher/Text operations"
---

# Replace non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) with regular spaces
find: "\u00A0"
replace: " "

Keyboard shortcuts

Text transforms appear in the QuickLauncher menu alongside regular prompts. You can assign them to keyboard slots (Ctrl+Alt+1 through Ctrl+Alt+0) for instant access:

1. Open Settings → Prompts
2. Select the transform in the tree
3. Choose a Shortcut slot from the dropdown at the bottom

Clipboard

After a transform runs, the cleaned target text is automatically copied to your clipboard. This is useful if you need to paste the cleaned text elsewhere – for example, into a text editor or a QA tool.

Technical notes

• Transforms use Trados’s ProcessSegmentPair API to commit changes, the same mechanism used by Batch Translate. This ensures all formatting tags (bold, italic, etc.) are preserved.
• After replacements, consecutive spaces are collapsed to a single space to prevent double spaces where an invisible character sat next to an existing space.
• Transforms do not appear in the AI Assistant chat – they run locally and show a brief confirmation dialogue.

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See Also

• QuickLauncher
• Prompts
• Keyboard Shortcuts