To show the Preferences dialog choose -> 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 editor preferences category is divided in 3 subwindows: General, Appearance, Spell Check and Fonts. All these settings customize how the editor behaves and looks.
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
-> 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, for example, \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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your system bell will beep when you switch on entries with errors like those described above.
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.
These options let you configure the appearance for the message editor. In upper part there are 4 checkboxes:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 TDE Control Center.
Here you can adjust the color for escaped characters like
(\"
) double quotes or (\n
) newline.
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.
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.
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.
The search section allows you to customize various settings for searching in previously translated strings.
General settings are common for all search types. If you check the 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 ->-> you can configure every search plugin.
The dictionary plugins installed by default are:
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.
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 (for example, the $lang.messages
file in the KDE Project, that can be found at
i18n.kde.org).
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 ->-> or by keeping the search button on the toolbar pressed down for a while.
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.
This is a standard KDE font chooser dialog with a little addition. You can select to view only fixed fonts by checking the 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.
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