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[OCLUG-Tech] Window resizing problem in a Java application

I am currently a full-time student at the University of Ottawa studying translation from French into English.

I am working with a specialized tool for computer-assisted translation. The purpose of the tool is to take two translated texts, align them and segment them so that they can be used as sources for matching text which can help speed up the translation of a new document. The tool is called a "bitext aligner."

The tool is written in Java and released under the GPL. The problem is that the authors have not included code to resize the application window (or to be more exact, if they have, it doesn't work). The default window is really too small to be useful. The "application window" does not respond to resizing events by the window manager on any platform.

This situation leads to several questions. I do not "do code." Can anyone familiar with Java suggest where on the spectrum of trivial to massive is the work effort required to get resizing code into the application and working?

I am on disability at the moment and paying my own way through university. There isn't a lot of money around, but I could consider a modest sum if fixing this package is inexpensive in terms of effort. Those who know me from my sporadic attendance at OCLUG meetings will know that I have been an avid computer hobbyist for > 25 years with an analytic approach to the application of technology to my former profession (in the Foreign Service) and my current one (as a student of translation). But this is not the time for me to take on learning a programming language.

The package in question is called bitext2tmx. It can be found at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitext2tmx


 --
Bruce Miller, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
bruce [ at ] brmiller [ dot ] ca; (613) 745-1151


... if someone had asked whether it would be harder to solve the problem of machine translation [of human language] or to place a man on the moon, most people in the 1950s would have responded that, given the availability of electronic brains ... --Alan Melby, The Possibility of Language