# Preferences

## &kbabel; preferences

To show the Preferences dialogue choose Settings Configure KBabel... from &kbabel;'s menu. It uses a structured configuration dialog which makes it very easy to find an option without having to perform an extensive search for it.

The left side of the preferences dialogue lists the categories of customisable items and the right side shows the corresponding tab for the selected category. &kbabel; keeps changes if you move between categories, so when you're finally happy click the OK button. At any time you can use quick help—just click on the question mark on the title bar and, after the cursor has changed to an arrow with a question mark, click on a button, label, or preference entry to find out more about it.

### Identity

This section allows you to set standard fields for every translated PO file. These are your name, email address, full language name, email address for your translation team mailing list. There is also a timezone field to track your last modified time for PO files. You can specify it as character sequence like EEST or offset from GMT time like +0200 (&ie; for Romania). This information is used when updating file headers. You can find the options that control what fields in the header should be updated in the Save section of the Preferences dialogue.

Character sequences for timezones are not standardised. So you should not use the string set here in time specification for saving in Save tab. You should use `%z` instead.

Number of singular/plural forms

- Use this for setting number of plural forms for your language. For example, it is 2 for German (one for the singular and one for the plural form).

  This feature is currently implemented only for plural forms format used in &kde;. It does not work with gettext plural forms.

### Editor

The editor preferences category is divided in 3 subwindows: General, Appearance, Spell Check and Fonts. All these settings customize how the editor behaves and looks.

#### General

This section contains a set of checkboxes.

The first checkbox in the upper side sets if the fuzzy status is reset automatically when a character is inputted into the MsgStr editor. When this option is disabled you have to manually choose Edit Unset Fuzzy Status or use the &Ctrl;U shortcut. Note that this means the string `, fuzzy` is removed from the entry's comment.

Next option allows you to enable clever editing, where editor automatically inserts special characters escaped correctly, ⪚ `\t` after pressing Tab and it allows special handling of Enter.

The lower checkboxes are very useful in assisting, not for the correctness of the translation, but if the translated string is a suitable replacement for the original. For example, many messages represent menu items with keyboard accelerator and C-like formatted strings whose structure must remain intact once translated.

Check Arguments

- When this option is selected, C-format strings in the original and the translation are checked to ensure the number of format sequences and the order are consistent.

Check Accelerator

- When this option is selected, &kbabel; checks if the number accelerator characters is identical in both the original and the translated string. Note that the accelerator marker is & (but not in every programming toolkit). See the Miscellaneous section below to find how to change a keyboard accelerator.

Check Equation

- This is a feature for the &kde; project development. `.desktop` files are simply text files which store various parameters in `value=key` format. Some of these `key`s are translatable. The only restriction is to maintain the left side of equality unchanged. Equation check allows you to spot many errors determined by the fuzzy `msgmerge` algorithm. Note that there are situations where this function generates false errors on some PO-files.

Look for Translated Context Info

- Some original messages are marked with context information to mark them as being unique even if they represent same word. This is because many simple words, such as Save, are translated into many languages. Context information is marked with `_:`. Many unexperienced translators translate the context information and fill their PO files with garbage. Check this box to make sure you will be warned about these errors in a file.

Check Plural Forms

- If you are translating &kde; project, it uses a special kind of syntax for specifying plural forms of messages. This check automatically counts the number of forms in msgstr and compares it with the number specified in Identity tab. Incorrect number of plural forms can result in crash of an application.

Beep on error

- Your system bell will beep when you switch on entries with errors like those described above.

Change text colour on error

- This is another type of warning about errors in current message. It is a good solution for those who are hearing impaired or dislike bell noise. See also the Appearance tab to find out how to change the text colour on errors.

#### Appearance

These options let you configure the appearance for the message editor. In upper part there are 4 checkboxes:

Highlight syntax

- Setting this option will enable syntax highlighting for special characters, accelerators and text background in the msgid viewer and msgstr editor. If don't have a monochrome display or have a visual impairment, you should enable this option.

Highlight background

- The background will be highlighted only for existing characters in the msgid and msgstr. This includes spaces. This is useful if you don't want to see the surrounding quotes (see below) for the PO entry, and you will still be able to observe starting and ending spaces in a text line.

Mark whitespaces with points

- When you feel the need to count spaces and background highlighting is not your taste then you can check this option to have a point sign drawn in the middle of whitespace characters. Note that the point is a point sign in the center of a character box and is not a decimal point.

Show surrounding quotes

- If you think that viewing the terminal characters in msgstr or msgid's text line is better for you then check this option to view the surrounding quotes for every text line.

  If you are experienced editing PO files with ordinary text editors you may feel safer if you can track starting and ending double quotes in PO entry lines.

For the different items in edited text there are different colour choices to make editing easy. Colours can be changed by clicking on colour-picker buttons. From the 'select color' dialogs you can choose from standard colours, custom colours or just pick a colour from any part of your screen.

Background colour

- This sets the background colour for characters in the MsgID view and the MsgStr editor. To change the general background colour of edit boxes you must use the &kcontrolcenter;.

Colour for quoted characters

- Here you can adjust the colour for escaped characters like (`\"`) double quotes or (`\n`) newline.

Colour for syntax errors

- This is the colour for the entire text entry if errors are detected when you try to save PO file. Errors are triggered by not terminating identically both msgid and msgstr, or escaping characters incorrectly.

Colour for c-format characters

- This sets the colour for a characters sequence like in C language `printf` or `scanf` functions. In general these start with (`%`) percent char and are continued by one char.

Colour for keyboard accelerators

- Keyboard accelerators start with (&) ampersand character in &kde; but if you are translating for other projects there might be an different character marking the accelerator key. See Miscellaneous section below to find how to change keyboard accelerator.

The status for the current edited entry is marked by three LEDs. For your convenience you can choose where to put these LEDs—either on the statusbar or in the editor section (between the msgid and msgstr entry). If have difficulties viewing some colours or you want to be able to track LED status changes easily without moving your eye you can select the preferred color using the colour button chooser.

#### Fonts

This is a standard &kde; font chooser dialogue with a little addition. You can select to view only fixed fonts by checking the Show only fixed fonts option. This is highly recommended for easy translating. The font dialogue lets you set font family, style, size and encoding. The bottom box shows a preview of the current font for user convenience.

### Save

This section allows you to edit the options for PO file saving. The first group of checkboxes controls general behaviour for actions performed in PO file saving.

Update header when saving

- Check this button to update the header information of the file every time it is saved. The header normally keeps information about the date and time the file was last updated; the last translator etc. You can choose which information you want to update from the Fields to update checkboxes area below. Fields that do not exist are added to the header. If you want to add additional fields to the header you can edit the header manually by choosing Edit Edit Header in the editor window.

Check syntax of file when saving

- Check this to automatically check syntax of file with ``msgfmt` --statistics` when saving a file. You will only get a message if an error occurred. You should keep this validation enabled unless you know what you're doing.

If you don't want to touch some fields in a PO file header or want to force updating of specific fields, there are five checkboxes which control this: revision date, PO file language, text encoding, last translator name, charset. If a field does not exist, it is appended to the header. If you want to add other information to the header, you have to edit the header manually by choosing Edit Edit Header in the editor window. Deactivate Update header when saving above if you don't want to have the header updated.

For date and time of the header field PO-Revision-Date you can choose one from bellow formats:

- Default is the format normally used in PO files.

- Local is the format specific to your country.

- Custom lets you define your own format, where you can use the following C-like format strings:

  ### Year

  Format | Meaning | Range
  %y | year | 00 to 99
  %Y | year | 0001 to 9999

  ### Month

  Format | Meaning | Range
  %m | month of year | 01 to 12
  %f | month of year | 1 to 12
  %b,%h | month abbreviation | Jan to Dec

  ### Day

  Format | Meaning | Range
  %j | day of the year | 001 to 366
  %d | day of month | 01 to 31
  %e | day of month | 1 to 31
  %a | weekday abbreviation | Sun to Sat

  ### Hour

  Format | Meaning | Range
  %H | hour | 00 to 23
  %k | hour | 0 to 23
  %i | hour | 1 to 12
  %I | hour | 01 to 12
  %p |  | AM or PM

  ### Minute, Second, Timezone

  Format | Meaning | Range
  %M | minute | 00 to 59
  %S | second | 00 to 59
  %Z | timezone | (given in identity settings)
  %z | timezone | (numeric offset as specified by system settings)

The lower group covers encoding options for PO files when saving. If you work on the &kde; project you should be aware that at least `desktop.po` file must be UTF-8 encoded. The drop-down list lets you select message encoding. You must at least have your language code and UTF-8 encoding set. If, for some reason, you don't want to accidentally change the current PO file encoding, turn on Keep the encoding of the file.

### Spell Check

Here you can set your spell checking preferences. This is of interest if you have a dictionary file for the language you are translating to. Below are the items to consider setting:

Create root/affix combinations not in dictionary

- For new words added to the personal dictionary, the spell checker will create root/affix combinations to match more than one word (variations).

Consider run-together words as spelling errors

- If this is turned on, joined words will be treated as errors. However, such words are very common in the German language, which have a very large number of compound words, so it should be left turned off in that case.

Dictionary

- From the popup list you can choose which dictionary to use. Note that you must install an appropriate dictionary for your language. Check your ispell or aspell distribution to find out if you have one.

Encoding

- Here you choose the encoding for your text. This option is passed to the spellchecker, and is used as the encoding for your words dictionary. See the kspell documentation for more details.

Client

- Backend program to use for spell checking. Currently either `ispell` (International Ispell) or aspell.

Remember ignored words

- Keep track of user-ignored words when spell-checking PO files. It is very convenient to ignore the abbreviations or strange letter combinations you meet in &GUI; interfaces.

File to store ignored words

- Here you can set location of the file for ignored words. Click on the folder icon to the right of the edit box. The default is `$(HOME)/.kde/share/apps/kbabel/spellignores`, where `$(HOME)` is your home folder.

### Search

The search section allows you to customise various settings for searching in previously translated strings.

#### General

General settings are common for all search types. If you check the Automatically start search option then the search is automatically started whenever you switch to another entry in the editor. Currently, there are three possibilities you can choose from, but since &kbabel; can use dictionary plugins the available dictionaries depend on those installed. Using Settings Configure Dictionary ... you can configure every search plugin.

The dictionary plugins installed by default are:

&kde; Database Search Engine

- This new method is still in alpha stage of development and is based on &kbabeldict; which accompanies &kbabel;. See &kbabeldict; documentation for further info on configuring the search engine.

PO Compendium

- The compendium is a normal PO file, which should contain a list of standard translations from your translation team. If you don't have one, you can also use a file that contains all the translations from your team (⪚ the `$lang.messages` file in the &kde; Project, that can be found at i18n.kde.org).

PO Auxiliary

- The auxiliary should help you find the context of a translation by looking up the same message in a message catalog of the same package but translated to another language. This way you can have a look how this message is translated in another language.

You can also start searching manually by choosing an entry in the popup menu that appears, either by clicking Dictionaries Search Text PO Compendium or by keeping the search button on the toolbar pressed down for a while.

### Diff

The Diff section holds settings how to display differences in msgids.

Every difference can be displayed by two added parts and by characters removed from the text. For both you can specify the method of display and the color to be used. Highlighted means that the background of the corresponding characters will be shown in the selected colour, while Underlined(for added characters) or Stroked Out (for removed characters) will denote the changed parts by coloured lines.

Diff mode needs to find the original msgid to compare with. For this purpose, &kbabel; can use the translation database if you turn in on by enabling Use messages from Translation Database. A second possibility is to use a tree of original PO files and specifying the root of the tree in Base folder for diff files.

### Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous section holds settings which don't fit anywhere else. Currently there are two:

Marker for keyboard accelerator

- Here you can select your own character to serve as the keyboard accelerator indicator in a &GUI;. By default it is & (ampersand), but in some programming toolkits it may vary. For example, in Gnome/GTK translations the underscore character _ is the marker for the keyboard accelerator.

Regular expression for context information

- For inexperienced users "regular expression" may sound strange. So you are advised to change the default value only if you know what you are doing. Some &GUI; programming toolkits provide their own context information description methods. Consult an experienced developer if you translate PO files other than standard &kde; files. For the sake of completeness I will "translate" for you what the default regular expression means: "the text matches if it starts with _: and is followed by one or more characters and ends with a newline".

## &cataloguemanager; preferences

This dialogue allows you to edit the options for the Catalogue Manager.

### General

Here are two edit lines with Browse... buttons. Type in the folders which contains all your PO- and respectively POT-files. The files and the folders in these folders will then be merged into one tree in Catalogue Manager window.

Below you can turn on and off if:

Open files in new window

- If this is activated all files that are opened from the Catalogue Manager are opened in a new window.

Kill processes on exit

- If you check this, &kbabel; tries to kill the processes that are not exited already when the program closes by sending a kill signal to them.

  It's not guaranteed that the processes are killed.

Create index for file contents

- If you check this, &kbabel; will create an index of contents for every file in the tree. This index is then used in find/replace operations.

  There is a large speed trade-off. If you enable Create index for file contents, the updating of file information will be much slower. On the other hand, it speeds up find/replace operations considerably.

### Folder Commands

Here you can insert commands you want to execute in folders from the Catalogue Manager. The commands are then shown in the submenu Commands in the Catalogue Manager's context menu.

Insert in the Name field the name of the command. The name can be chosen freely and is only used to be displayed in the menu. In the Command field insert the command you want to have executed when selecting the corresponding menu item. Then press the Add button to add the command to your available commands. To edit a command, select it, press the Edit button and press Add after you have finished. To remove a command, select it from the list and press the Remove button. If you want a different order in the contextual submenu, you can use the up and down buttons.

The command is executed through your default shell, so you can execute multiple commands at once by separating them with a semicolon, and you can set environment variables if you need to. The commands are executed in the (PO file) folder you have selected in the Catalogue Manager.

The following strings will be replaced in a command:

- `@PACKAGE@`: The name of the folder without path

- `@PODIR@`: The name of the PO-folder with path

- `@POTDIR@`: The name of the template folder with path

E.g.: If you want to execute `make` and then `make install` you could insert in `Make install` in the Name field, and `make; make install` in the Command field. If you then select Commands Make install from the context menu of a folder, the commands listed above will be executed in that folder.

### File Commands

Here you can insert the commands you want to execute on files from the Catalogue Manager. The commands are then shown in the submenu Commands in the Catalogue Manager's context menu.

Insert in the Name field the name of the command. The name can be chosen freely and is only used to be displayed in the menu. In the Command field insert the command you want to have executed when selecting the corresponding menu item. Then press the Add button to add the command to your available commands. To edit a command, select it, press the Edit button and press the Add button after you have finished. To remove a command, select it from the list and press the Remove button. If you want a different order in the contextual submenu, you can use the up and down buttons.

The command is executed through your default shell, so you can execute multiple commands at once by separating them with a semicolon, and you can set environment variables, if you need. The commands are executed in the (PO file) folder, in which the file, you have selected in the Catalogue Manager, is.

The following strings will be replaced in a command:

- `@PACKAGE@`: The name of the file without path and extension

- `@POFILE@`: The name of the PO file with path and extension

- `@POTFILE@`: The name of the corresponding template file with path and extension

- `@PODIR@`: The name of the folder the PO file is in, with path

- `@POTDIR@`: The name of the folder the template file is in, with path

For example, if you want to merge the template file into your PO file you could insert `Merge` in the Name field and `msgmerge @POFILE@ @POTFILE@ > @PACKAGE@.new && mv @PACKAGE@.new "@PACKAGE@.po` in the Command field. If you then select Commands Merge from a file's context menu, the PO file will be merged with its template file.