Categories of file formats

The file formats supported by WorldServer are grouped into three MIME (or format) categories. For a complete default listing, go to the Management > Administration > Customization > MIME Types page.

Application
These file formats include Microsoft Office applications (such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel), specific "flavors" of XML (such as DITA and DocBook), Java server pages and .NET resources.

The default configurations for these file formats should identify the translatable content in your assets correctly most of the time. You can create specific configurations for all file types by going to Management > Linguistic Tool Setup > File Types.
Image
In general, image file types are not translatable. The exception is the Binary File Type, which handles files with .png, .jpg and .gif file extensions by default.
Note: You can confgure the file type to handle other image types, such as .bmp, by creating a new MIME type for that file extension.

The Binary File type handles images within the translatable content in WorldServer Browser Workbench. It can be used to mark a file as translatable, but not segmentable. For example, you could apply the Binary File Type to an image file that contains content that you want translated. A workflow can send it to a translator, who would need to use the appropriate tools to prepare a localized file in that format, and then upload the target file into WorldServer.

Note: You can use the Binary File Type only with the WorldServer Browser Workbench. You cannot export a binary asset to a desktop translation tool; you must upload and download the associated files directly into the tool.
Text
For text file formats, the file types parse and retrieve translatable text from files using popular markup languages including HTML, Adobe FrameMaker MIF files, and Quark Express export formats.

Some text file types are meant for simple files that don’t involve complicated rules for parsing the file and that only contain plain text.

The WorldServer SDK lets you create custom file types in any category and specify particular processing behaviors. For example, you can create a text file type to process a text file with a strict format for the translatable portion of the file.