OmegaT Live preview (based on LibreOffice)

Below you’ll find a quick and dirty live preview solution for OmegaT on GNU/Linux.

In order for it to work, you’ll need any command line converter to convert your target files to PDF, and any PDF viewer to view the converted file. In the solution provided here Zathura PDF viewer is used. It is a very lightweight, keyboard-driven (albeit with vi-like keybindings) application that can invert document colors using a custom color scheme, and, most importantly, it reloads documents as they are changed, but keeps the previously open position, which makes it ideal for live previewing. Target files are converted using LibreOffice since I had it installed anyway; but any other command line tool that converts to PDF would do.

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Target Document Preview

Situation

So, now you’re working on a fancy formatted file and would like to have a preview of what your translation looks like. To do that, you save in OmegaT (Ctrl+S), create translated document (Ctrl+D), and open it in LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org. A bit awkward, and you wish there were a preview button in OmegaT, but oh well, as long as it gets things done, you’ll bare with it.

Problem

But oops, the document was already open, and opening it again doesn’t automatically update the view in Office. Luckily, there is File → Reload functionality now both in LibreOffice and in OpenOffice.org, so you don’t have to close the document and reopen it again.
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