Chapter 6. Preferences

KBabel preferences

To show the Preferences dialog 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 dialog lists the categories of customizable 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 (i.e. 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 dialog.

Warning

Character sequences for timezones are not standardized. 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).

Note

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, e.g. \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 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 keys 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 color 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 color 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 color choices to make editing easy. Colors can be changed by clicking on color-picker buttons. From the 'select color' dialogs you can choose from standard colors, custom colors or just pick a color from any part of your screen.

Background color

This sets the background color for characters in the MsgID view and the MsgStr editor. To change the general background color of edit boxes you must use the KDE Control Center.

Color for quoted characters

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

Color for syntax errors

This is the color 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.

Color for c-format characters

This sets the color 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.

Color 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 colors or you want to be able to track LED status changes easily without moving your eye you can select the preferred color using the color button chooser.

Fonts

This is a standard KDE font chooser dialog 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 dialog 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 behavior 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:

    Table 6.1. Year

    FormatMeaningRange
    %yyear00 to 99
    %Yyear0001 to 9999

    Table 6.2. Month

    FormatMeaningRange
    %mmonth of year01 to 12
    %fmonth of year1 to 12
    %b,%hmonth abbreviationJan to Dec

    Table 6.3. Day

    FormatMeaningRange
    %jday of the year001 to 366
    %dday of month01 to 31
    %eday of month1 to 31
    %aweekday abbreviationSun to Sat

    Table 6.4. Hour

    FormatMeaningRange
    %Hhour00 to 23
    %khour0 to 23
    %ihour1 to 12
    %Ihour01 to 12
    %p AM or PM

    Table 6.5. Minute, Second, Timezone

    FormatMeaningRange
    %Mminute00 to 59
    %Ssecond00 to 59
    %Ztimezone(given in identity settings)
    %ztimezone(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 customize 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 (e.g. 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 color, while Underlined(for added characters) or Stroked Out (for removed characters) will denote the changed parts by colored 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".