This interface can be used to establish communication across components or between components and the host application during conversion.

Communication between components during conversion is normally handled by embedding information in the actual content, e.g. by calling CustomInfo(ICustomInfoProperties), by setting custom properties on tags or contexts, or by adding actual content such as tags or contexts to the output. That is often the preferred method for content processing components to communicate, since the information will travel with the data it relates to, and is therefore not affected by buffering, etc. However, it is sometimes useful to establish communication of unrelated properties or to communicate 'upstream', in which case shared objects constitute the preferred mechanism.

An example of the use of shared objects are verification settings, which are passed from SDL Trados Studio to the verifier components.

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