Preferences

preferences
To show the Preferences dialog choose Settings Configure KBabel... from '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. keeps changes if you move between categories, so when you're finally happy click the OK button. At any moment 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 ( for Romania). This information is used when updating file headers. You can find the options control what fields in the header should be updated in the Save section of the Preferences dialog.
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).
This feature is currently implemented only for plural forms format used in . 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 resetted 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 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 the correctness of the translation corectness but if the translated string is a suitable replacement for the first within the sofware. For example, many messages represent menu items with keyboard accelerator and C-like formated 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 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 KDE project development. .desktop files are simply text files which store various parameters in value=key format. Some of these key 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 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 a 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 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 .
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 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 prefered color using the color button chooser.

Fonts
This is a standard 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 let you set font family, style, size and encoding. The bottom box shows a preview of the current for user convenience.

Save
This section allows you to edit the options for PO file saving. The first checkboxes group control general behavior for actions performed at PO file saving command.
Update header when saving 	 Check this button, to update the header information of the file everytime when 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 options enabled unless know what you're doing.
If you don't want to touch some fields in PO file header or want to force updating specific fields, there are five checkboxes which control: 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 cover encoding options for PO file when saving. If you work on project you should be aware that at least desktop.po file must be UTF-8 encoded. Popup list let you select messages encoding. At least your language setting and UTF-8 must be. If, for some reasons, you don't want accidentally change current PO file encoding, turn on Keep the encoding of the file.

Spell Check
Here you can set your spell checking preferences. These is for interest if you have dictionary file for your translating language. Bellow are items to consider setting:
Create root/affix combinations not in dictionary 	 For new words added to the personal dictionary, spell check engine will create root/affix combinations to match more than one word (variations).
Consider run-together words as spelling errors 	 If this is turned on then joined words will be treated as errors. However, this situations is very usual in German language, which have a very large number of compound words, so 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 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 directory.

Search
The search section allows you to customize various settings for searching in previous 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 at three posibilies you can choose from, but since can use dictionary plugins the available dictionaries depend on those installed. Using Settings Configure Dictionary ... you can configure every search plugin.
The default installed dictionary plugins are:
Database Search Engine 	 This new method is still in alpha stage of development and base it task on which accompanies . See documentation for further info on configuring search engine.
PO Compendium 	The compendium is a normal PO file, which should contain a list of standard translation from your translation team. If you don't have one, you can also use a file that contains all translations of your team (⪚ the $lang.messages file in the Project, that can be found at i18n.kde.org).
PO Auxiliary 	The auxiliary should help you finding 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 for a while.

Diff
The Diff section hold settings how to display differences in msgids.
Every difference can be displayed by two added parts and by removed characters of the text. For both you can specify the method of displaying and the color, which will be used. Highlighted means that the background of the corresponding characters will be shown in the selected color, while Underlined(for added characters) or Striked Out (for removed characters) will denote the changed parts by colored lines.
Diff mode needs to find the original msgid to compare to. For this purpose, can use translation database if you turn in on by Use messages from Translation Database. Second possibility is to use a tree of original PO files. Then you need to specify the root of the tree in Base directory for diff files.

Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous section hold settings which don't feet anywhere. Currently are two:
Marker for keyboard accelerator 	 Here you can put your own character which serve as marker for keyboard accelerator indicator in GUI. By default it is & (ampersand), but in some programing 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 unexperienced user "regular expression" sound strange. However, you're advised to change default value only you know what you are doing. Some GUI programming toolkits provide own context information description methods. Consult an experienced developer if you translate PO files other than specifics. For the sake of completness I "translate" for you what default regular expression mean: "the text match if it start with _: and is followed by one or more characters and end with a newline".

preferences
This dialog allows you to edit the options for the Catalog Manager.

General
Here are two editlines with Browse... buttons. Type in the directories which contains all your PO- and respectively POT-files. The files and the directories in these directories will then be merged into one tree in Catalog 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 Catalog Manager are opened in a new window.
Kill processes on exit 	 If you check this tries to kill the processes, that are not exited already when program close 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 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 creating index, the updating of file information will be much slower. On the other hand, it speedup find/replace operation considerably.

Directory Commands
Here you can insert commands you want to execute in directories from the Catalog Manager. The commands are then shown in the submenu Commands in the Catalog Manager's context menu.
Insert in field Name the name of the command. The name can be chosen freely and is only used to be displayed in the menu. In field Command insert the command, you want to have executed when selecting the corresponding menu item. Then press Add button to add the command to your available commands. To edit a command, select it, press Edit button and press Add after you have finished. To remove a command, select one from list and press Remove button. If you want different order in contexual submenu, you can use 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) directory, you have selected in the Catalog Manager.
The following strings will be replaced in a command:
@PACKAGE@: The name of the directory without path
@PODIR@: The name of the PO-directory with path
@POTDIR@: The name of the template directory with path
E.g.: If you want to execute make and then make install you could insert in field Name Make install and in field Command make; make install. If you then select Commands Make install from the context menu of a directory, the commands listed above will be executed in this directory.

File Commands
Here you can insert the commands you want to execute on files from the Catalog Manager. The commands are then shown in the submenu Commands in the Catalog Manager's context menu.
Insert in field Name the name of the command. The name can be chosen freely and is only used to be displayed in the menu. In field Command insert the command, you want to have executed when selecting the corresponding menu item. Then press Add button to add the command to your available commands. To edit a command, select it, press Edit and press Add after you have finished. To remove a command, select one from list and press Remove button. If you want different order in contexual submenu, you can use 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) directory, in which the file, you have selected in the Catalog 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 directory, the PO file is in, with path
@POTDIR@: The name of the directory, the template file is in, with path
For example, if you want to merge the template file into your PO file you could insert in field Name Merge and in field Command msgmerge @POFILE@ @POTFILE@ > @PACKAGE@.new && mv @PACKAGE@.new "@PACKAGE@.po. If you then select Commands Merge from a file's context menu, the PO file will be merged with its template file.