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If the file has been modified, it is saved to disk first. In both cases, and prior to all this, the commands check if any untranslated messages remain in the PO file and, if so, the translator is asked if she really wants to leave off working with this PO file.

This is the preferred way of getting rid of an Emacs PO file buffer. Merely killing it through the usual command C-x k kill-buffer is not the tidiest way to proceed. The command 0 po-other-window is another, softer way, to leave PO mode, temporarily.

It just moves the cursor to some other Emacs window, and pops one if necessary. For example, if the translator just got PO mode to show some source context in some other, she might discover some apparent bug in the program source that needs correction. This command allows the translator to change sex, become a programmer, and have the cursor right into the window containing the program she or rather he wants to modify.

By later getting the cursor back in the PO file window, or by asking Emacs to edit this file once again, PO mode is then recovered. The command h po-help displays a summary of all available PO mode commands. The translator should then type any character to resume normal PO mode operations. The command? The command V po-validate launches msgfmt in checking and verbose mode over the current PO file.

This command first offers to save the current PO file on disk. The msgfmt tool, from GNU gettext , has the purpose of creating a MO file out of a PO file, and PO mode uses the features of this program for checking the overall format of a PO file, as well as all individual entries. The program msgfmt runs asynchronously with Emacs, so the translator regains control immediately while her PO file is being studied. Once the cursor is on the line in error, the translator may decide on any PO mode action which would help correcting the error.

The cursor in a PO file window is almost always part of an entry. The only exceptions are the special case when the cursor is after the last entry in the file, or when the PO file is empty.

The entry where the cursor is found to be is said to be the current entry. Many PO mode commands operate on the current entry, so moving the cursor does more than allowing the translator to browse the PO file, this also selects on which entry commands operate.

Some PO mode commands alter the position of the cursor in a specialized way. A few of those special purpose positioning are described here, the others are described in following sections for a complete list try C-h m :. Exchange the current entry location with the previously saved one po-exchange-location.

Any Emacs command able to reposition the cursor may be used to select the current entry in PO mode, including commands which move by characters, lines, paragraphs, screens or pages, and search commands. However, there is a kind of standard way to display the current entry in PO mode, which usual Emacs commands moving the cursor do not especially try to enforce. The command. It is yet to be decided if PO mode helps the translator, or otherwise irritates her, by forcing a rigid window disposition while she is doing her work.

We originally had quite precise ideas about how windows should behave, but on the other hand, anyone used to Emacs is often happy to keep full control. Maybe a fixed window disposition might be offered as a PO mode option that the translator might activate or deactivate at will, so it could be offered on an experimental basis. If nobody feels a real need for using it, or a compulsion for writing it, we should drop this whole idea.

The incentive for doing it should come from translators rather than programmers, as opinions from an experienced translator are surely more worth to me than opinions from programmers thinking about how others should do translation. The commands n po-next-entry and p po-previous-entry move the cursor the entry following, or preceding, the current one. If n is given while the cursor is on the last entry of the PO file, or if p is given while the cursor is on the first entry, no move is done.

But even these commands will fail on a truly empty PO file. There are development plans for the PO mode for it to interactively fill an empty PO file from sources. See Marking. The translator may decide, before working at the translation of a particular entry, that she needs to browse the remainder of the PO file, maybe for finding the terminology or phraseology used in related entries.

She can of course use the standard Emacs idioms for saving the current cursor location in some register, and use that register for getting back, or else, use the location ring. PO mode offers another approach, by which cursor locations may be saved onto a special stack.

The command m po-push-location merely adds the location of current entry to the stack, pushing the already saved locations under the new one. The command r po-pop-location consumes the top stack element and repositions the cursor to the entry associated with that top element. This position is then lost, for the next r will move the cursor to the previously saved location, and so on until no locations remain on the stack.

If the translator wants the position to be kept on the location stack, maybe for taking a look at the entry associated with the top element, then go elsewhere with the intent of getting back later, she ought to use m immediately after r. The command x po-exchange-location simultaneously repositions the cursor to the entry associated with the top element of the stack of saved locations, and replaces that top element with the location of the current entry before the move.

Consequently, repeating the x command toggles alternatively between two entries. For achieving this, the translator will position the cursor on the first entry, use m , then position to the second entry, and merely use x for making the switch.

There are many different ways for encoding a particular string into a PO file entry, because there are so many different ways to split and quote multi-line strings, and even, to represent special characters by backslashed escaped sequences.

Some features of PO mode rely on the ability for PO mode to scan an already existing PO file for a particular string encoded into the msgid field of some entry. Even if PO mode has internally all the built-in machinery for implementing this recognition easily, doing it fast is technically difficult.

To facilitate a solution to this efficiency problem, we decided on a canonical representation for strings. A conventional representation of strings in a PO file is currently under discussion, and PO mode experiments with a canonical representation.

Having both xgettext and PO mode converging towards a uniform way of representing equivalent strings would be useful, as the internal normalization needed by PO mode could be automatically satisfied when using xgettext from GNU gettext. An explicit PO mode normalization should then be only necessary for PO files imported from elsewhere, or for when the convention itself evolves.

So, for achieving normalization of at least the strings of a given PO file needing a canonical representation, the following PO mode command is available:. The special command M-x po-normalize , which has no associated keys, revises all entries, ensuring that strings of both original and translated entries use uniform internal quoting in the PO file. It also removes any crumb after the last entry. This command may be useful for PO files freshly imported from elsewhere, or if we ever improve on the canonical quoting format we use.

This canonical format is not only meant for getting cleaner PO files, but also for greatly speeding up msgid string lookup for some other PO mode commands. M-x po-normalize presently makes three passes over the entries. These heuristics may fail for comments not related to obsolete entries and ending with a backslash; they also depend on subsequent passes for finalizing the proper commenting of continued lines for obsolete entries.

This first pass might disappear once all oldish PO files would have been adjusted. The second and third pass normalize all msgid and msgstr strings respectively. Having such an explicit normalizing command allows for importing PO files from other sources, but also eases the evolution of the current convention, evolution driven mostly by aesthetic concerns, as of now.

It is easy to make suggested adjustments at a later time, as the normalizing command and eventually, other GNU gettext tools should greatly automate conformance. A description of the canonical string format is given below, for the particular benefit of those not having Emacs handy, and who would nevertheless want to handcraft their PO files in nice ways. Right now, in PO mode, strings are single line or multi-line.

So, we would have:. We are deliberately using a caricatural example, here, to make the point clearer. Usually, multi-lines are not that bad looking. It is probable that we will implement the following suggestion. There are a few yet undecided little points about string normalization, to be documented in this manual, once these questions settle. Each PO file entry for which the msgstr field has been filled with a translation, and which is not marked as fuzzy see Fuzzy Entries , is said to be a translated entry.

Only translated entries will later be compiled by GNU msgfmt and become usable in programs. Other entry types will be excluded; translation will not occur for them. The commands t po-next-translated-entry and T po-previous-translated-entry move forwards or backwards, chasing for an translated entry. If none is found, the search is extended and wraps around in the PO file buffer.

Translated entries usually result from the translator having edited in a translation for them, Modifying Translations. However, if the variable po-auto-fuzzy-on-edit is not nil , the entry having received a new translation first becomes a fuzzy entry, which ought to be later unfuzzied before becoming an official, genuine translated entry.

Each PO file entry may have a set of attributes , which are qualities given a name and explicitly associated with the translation, using a special system comment. One of these attributes has the name fuzzy , and entries having this attribute are said to have a fuzzy translation.

They are called fuzzy entries, for short. Fuzzy entries, even if they account for translated entries for most other purposes, usually call for revision by the translator. Those may be produced by applying the program msgmerge to update an older translated PO files according to a new PO template file, when this tool hypothesises that some new msgid has been modified only slightly out of an older one, and chooses to pair what it thinks to be the old translation for the new modified entry.

The slight alteration in the original string the msgid string should often be reflected in the translated string, and this requires the intervention of the translator. For this reason, msgmerge might mark some entries as being fuzzy. Also, the translator may decide herself to mark an entry as fuzzy for her own convenience, when she wants to remember that the entry has to be later revisited.

So, some commands are more specifically related to fuzzy entry processing. The commands f po-next-fuzzy-entry and F po-previous-fuzzy-entry move forwards or backwards, chasing for a fuzzy entry.

The command TAB po-unfuzzy removes the fuzzy attribute associated with an entry, usually leaving it translated. Further, if the variable po-auto-select-on-unfuzzy has not the nil value, the TAB command will automatically chase for another interesting entry to work on.

The initial value of po-auto-select-on-unfuzzy is nil. The initial value of po-auto-fuzzy-on-edit is nil. However, if the variable po-auto-fuzzy-on-edit is set to t , any entry edited through the RET command is marked fuzzy, as a way to ensure some kind of double check, later. In this case, the usual paradigm is that an entry becomes fuzzy if not already whenever the translator modifies it.

If she is satisfied with the translation, she then uses TAB to pick another entry to work on, clearing the fuzzy attribute on the same blow. If she is not satisfied yet, she merely uses SPC to chase another entry, leaving the entry fuzzy. The translator may also use the DEL command po-fade-out-entry over any translated entry to mark it as being fuzzy, when she wants to easily leave a trace she wants to later return working at this entry.

Also, when time comes to quit working on a PO file buffer with the q command, the translator is asked for confirmation, if fuzzy string still exists. When xgettext originally creates a PO file, unless told otherwise, it initializes the msgid field with the untranslated string, and leaves the msgstr string to be empty. Such entries, having an empty translation, are said to be untranslated entries. Later, when the programmer slightly modifies some string right in the program, this change is later reflected in the PO file by the appearance of a new untranslated entry for the modified string.

The usual commands moving from entry to entry consider untranslated entries on the same level as active entries. The work of the translator might be quite naively seen as the process of seeking for an untranslated entry, editing a translation for it, and repeating these actions until no untranslated entries remain. Some commands are more specifically related to untranslated entry processing. The commands u po-next-untranslated-entry and U po-previous-untransted-entry move forwards or backwards, chasing for an untranslated entry.

An entry can be turned back into an untranslated entry by merely emptying its translation, using the command k po-kill-msgstr. See Modifying Translations. Also, when time comes to quit working on a PO file buffer with the q command, the translator is asked for confirmation, if some untranslated string still exists. By obsolete PO file entries, we mean those entries which are commented out, usually by msgmerge when it found that the translation is not needed anymore by the package being localized.

The usual commands moving from entry to entry consider obsolete entries on the same level as active entries. Obsolete entries are easily recognizable by the fact that all their lines start with , even those lines containing msgid or msgstr.

Commands exist for emptying the translation or reinitializing it to the original untranslated string. Commands interfacing with the kill ring may force some previously saved text into the translation. The user may interactively edit the translation. All these commands may apply to obsolete entries, carefully leaving the entry obsolete after the fact.

The commands o po-next-obsolete-entry and O po-previous-obsolete-entry move forwards or backwards, chasing for an obsolete entry. PO mode does not provide ways for un-commenting an obsolete entry and making it active, because this would reintroduce an original untranslated string which does not correspond to any marked string in the program sources.

This goes with the philosophy of never introducing useless msgid values. However, it is possible to comment out an active entry, so making it obsolete. GNU gettext utilities will later react to the disappearance of a translation by using the untranslated string.

The command DEL po-fade-out-entry pushes the current entry a little further towards annihilation. If the entry is active it is a translated entry , then it is first made fuzzy. If it is already fuzzy, then the entry is merely commented out, with confirmation.

If the entry is already obsolete, then it is completely deleted from the PO file. It is easy to recycle the translation so deleted into some other PO file entry, usually one which is untranslated.

Here is a quite interesting problem to solve for later development of PO mode, for those nights you are not sleepy. The idea would be that PO mode might become bright enough, one of these days, to make good guesses at retrieving the most probable candidate, among all obsolete entries, for initializing the translation of a newly appeared string.

I think it might be a quite hard problem to do this algorithmically, as we have to develop good and efficient measures of string similarity. Right now, PO mode completely lets the decision to the translator, when the time comes to find the adequate obsolete translation, it merely tries to provide handy tools for helping her to do so. By doing so, it pretends helping the translator to avoid little clerical errors about the overall file format, or the proper quoting of strings, as those errors would be easily made.

Other kinds of errors are still possible, but some may be caught and diagnosed by the batch validation process, which the translator may always trigger by the V command. For all other errors, the translator has to rely on her own judgment, and also on the linguistic reports submitted to her by the users of the translated package, having the same mother tongue.

When the time comes to create a translation, correct an error diagnosed mechanically or reported by a user, the translators have to resort to using the following commands for modifying the translations.

Reinitialize the translation with the original, untranslated string po-msgid-to-msgstr. Save the translation on the kill ring, without deleting it po-kill-ring-save-msgstr. The command RET po-edit-msgstr opens a new Emacs window meant to edit in a new translation, or to modify an already existing translation.

The new window contains a copy of the translation taken from the current PO file entry, all ready for edition, expunged of all quoting marks, fully modifiable and with the complete extent of Emacs modifying commands.

When the translator is done with her modifications, she may use C-c C-c to close the subedit window with the automatically requoted results, or C-c C-k to abort her modifications. See Subedit , for more information. The command LFD po-msgid-to-msgstr initializes, or reinitializes the translation with the original string. This command is normally used when the translator wants to redo a fresh translation of the original string, disregarding any previous work. It is possible to arrange so, whenever editing an untranslated entry, the LFD command be automatically executed.

If you set po-auto-edit-with-msgid to t , the translation gets initialised with the original string, in case none exists already.

The default value for po-auto-edit-with-msgid is nil. In fact, whether it is best to start a translation with an empty string, or rather with a copy of the original string, is a matter of taste or habit. Sometimes, the source language and the target language are so different that is simply best to start writing on an empty page.

At other times, the source and target languages are so close that it would be a waste to retype a number of words already being written in the original string.

A translator may also like having the original string right under her eyes, as she will progressively overwrite the original text with the translation, even if this requires some extra editing work to get rid of the original. The command k po-kill-msgstr merely empties the translation string, so turning the entry into an untranslated one.

But while doing so, its previous contents is put apart in a special place, known as the kill ring. The command w po-kill-ring-save-msgstr has also the effect of taking a copy of the translation onto the kill ring, but it otherwise leaves the entry alone, and does not remove the translation from the entry.

Both commands use exactly the Emacs kill ring, which is shared between buffers, and which is well known already to Emacs lovers. The translator may use k or w many times in the course of her work, as the kill ring may hold several saved translations. From the kill ring, strings may later be reinserted in various Emacs buffers.

In particular, the kill ring may be used for moving translation strings between different entries of a single PO file buffer, or if the translator is handling many such buffers at once, even between PO files. To facilitate exchanges with buffers which are not in PO mode, the translation string put on the kill ring by the k command is fully unquoted before being saved: external quotes are removed, multi-line strings are concatenated, and backslash escaped sequences are turned into their corresponding characters.

In the special case of obsolete entries, the translation is also uncommented prior to saving. The command y po-yank-msgstr completely replaces the translation of the current entry by a string taken from the kill ring. Following Emacs terminology, we then say that the replacement string is yanked into the PO file buffer. See Yanking in The Emacs Editor.

The first time y is used, the translation receives the value of the most recent addition to the kill ring. If y is typed once again, immediately, without intervening keystrokes, the translation just inserted is taken away and replaced by the second most recent addition to the kill ring. By repeating y many times in a row, the translator may travel along the kill ring for saved strings, until she finds the string she really wanted.

When a string is yanked into a PO file entry, it is fully and automatically requoted for complying with the format PO files should have. Further, if the entry is obsolete, PO mode then appropriately push the inserted string inside comments.

Once again, translators should not burden themselves with quoting considerations besides, of course, the necessity of the translated string itself respective to the program using it.

Note that k or w are not the only commands pushing strings on the kill ring, as almost any PO mode command replacing translation strings or the translator comments automatically saves the old string on the kill ring. The main exceptions to this general rule are the yanking commands themselves. When the programmer slightly modifies some string right in the program, his change is later reflected in the PO file by the appearance of a new untranslated entry for the modified string, and the fact that the entry translating the original or unmodified string becomes obsolete.

In many cases, the translator might spare herself some work by retrieving the unmodified translation from the obsolete entry, then initializing the untranslated entry msgstr field with this retrieved translation. Once this done, the obsolete entry is not wanted anymore, and may be safely deleted.

When the translator finds an untranslated entry and suspects that a slight variant of the translation exists, she immediately uses m to mark the current entry location, then starts chasing obsolete entries with o , hoping to find some translation corresponding to the unmodified string.

Once found, she uses the DEL command for deleting the obsolete entry, knowing that DEL also kills the translation, that is, pushes the translation on the kill ring. Then, r returns to the initial untranslated entry, and y then yanks the saved translation right into the msgstr field.

The translator is then free to use RET for fine tuning the translation contents, and maybe to later use u , then m again, for going on with the next untranslated string. When some sequence of keys has to be typed over and over again, the translator may find it useful to become better acquainted with the Emacs capability of learning these sequences and playing them back under request.

Any translation work done seriously will raise many linguistic difficulties, for which decisions have to be made, and the choices further documented. These documents may be saved within the PO file in form of translator comments, which the translator is free to create, delete, or modify at will. These comments may be useful to herself when she returns to this PO file after a while.

So, the commands below will never alter such system added comments, they are not meant for the translator to modify. See PO Files. The following commands are somewhat similar to those modifying translations, so the general indications given for those apply here. Save the translator comments on the kill ring, without deleting it po-kill-ring-save-comment.

Replace the translator comments, taking the new from the kill ring po-yank-comment. These commands parallel PO mode commands for modifying the translation strings, and behave much the same way as they do, except that they handle this part of PO file comments meant for translator usage, rather than the translation strings. So, if the descriptions given below are slightly succinct, it is because the full details have already been given.

The command po-edit-comment opens a new Emacs window containing a copy of the translator comments on the current PO file entry. If there are no such comments, PO mode understands that the translator wants to add a comment to the entry, and she is presented with an empty screen. Comment marks and the space following them are automatically removed before edition, and reinstated after. For translator comments pertaining to obsolete entries, the uncommenting and recommenting operations are done twice.

Once in the editing window, the keys C-c C-c allow the translator to tell she is finished with editing the comment. See Subedit , for further details. Functions found on po-subedit-mode-hook , if any, are executed after the string has been inserted in the edit buffer.

The command K po-kill-comment gets rid of all translator comments, while saving those comments on the kill ring. The command W po-kill-ring-save-comment takes a copy of the translator comments on the kill ring, but leaves them undisturbed in the current entry. The command Y po-yank-comment completely replaces the translator comments by a string taken at the front of the kill ring. When this command is immediately repeated, the comments just inserted are withdrawn, and replaced by other strings taken along the kill ring.

On the kill ring, all strings have the same nature. There is no distinction between translation strings and translator comments strings. Foreseeing that she will do that in her documentation, the translator may want to quote the previous translation in her translator comments. To do so, she may initialize the translator comments with the previous translation, still at the head of the kill ring. Because editing already pushed the previous translation on the kill ring, she merely has to type M-w prior to , and the previous translation will be right there, all ready for being introduced by some explanatory text.

On the other hand, presume there are some translator comments already and that the translator wants to add to those comments, instead of wholly replacing them.

Then, she should edit the comment right away with. Once inside the editing window, she can use the regular Emacs commands C-y yank and M-y yank-pop to get the previous translation where she likes. The PO subedit minor mode has a few peculiarities worth being described in fuller detail.

It installs a few commands over the usual editing set of Emacs, which are described below. Once this is done, the command C-c C-c po-subedit-exit may be used to return the edited translation into the PO file, replacing the original translation, even if it moved out of sight or if buffers were switched. If the translator becomes unsatisfied with her translation or comment, to the extent she prefers keeping what was existent prior to the RET or command, she may use the command C-c C-k po-subedit-abort to merely get rid of edition, while preserving the original translation or comment.

Another way would be for her to exit normally with C-c C-c , then type U once for undoing the whole effect of last edition. The command C-c C-a po-subedit-cycle-auxiliary allows for glancing through translations already achieved in other languages, directly while editing the current translation. This may be quite convenient when the translator is fluent at many languages, but of course, only makes sense when such completed auxiliary PO files are already available to her see Auxiliary.

While editing her translation, the translator should pay attention to not inserting unwanted RET newline characters at the end of the translated string if those are not meant to be there, or to removing such characters when they are required. Since these characters are not visible in the editing buffer, they are easily introduced by mistake. When a translation or a comment is being edited, the translator may move the cursor back into the PO file buffer and freely move to other entries, browsing at will.

If, with an edition pending, the translator wanders in the PO file buffer, she may decide to start modifying another entry.

Each entry being edited has its own subedit buffer. It is possible to simultaneously edit the translation and the comment of a single entry, or to edit entries in different PO files, all at once. Typing RET on a field already being edited merely resumes that particular edit. Yet, the translator should better be comfortable at handling many Emacs windows! Pending subedits may be completed or aborted in any order, regardless of how or when they were started.

When many subedits are pending and the translator asks for quitting the PO file with the q command , subedits are automatically resumed one at a time, so she may decide for each of them. PO mode is particularly powerful when used with PO files created through GNU gettext utilities, as those utilities insert special comments in the PO files they generate.

Some of these special comments relate the PO file entry to exactly where the untranslated string appears in the program sources. When the translator gets to an untranslated entry, she is fairly often faced with an original string which is not as informative as it normally should be, being succinct, cryptic, or otherwise ambiguous. Before choosing how to translate the string, she needs to understand better what the string really means and how tight the translation has to be.

Most of the time, when problems arise, the only way left to make her judgment is looking at the true program sources from where this string originated, searching for surrounding comments the programmer might have put in there, and looking around for helping clues of any kind.

Surely, when looking at program sources, the translator will receive more help if she is a fluent programmer.

However, even if she is not versed in programming and feels a little lost in C code, the translator should not be shy at taking a look, once in a while. It is most probable that she will still be able to find some of the hints she needs.

The following commands are meant to help the translator at getting program source context for a PO file entry. Resume the display of a program source context, or cycle through them po-cycle-source-reference. The commands s po-cycle-source-reference and M-s po-select-source-reference both open another window displaying some source program file, and already positioned in such a way that it shows an actual use of the string to be translated.

By doing so, the command gives source program context for the string. But if the entry has no source context references, or if all references are unresolved along the search path for program sources, then the command diagnoses this as an error.

Even if s or M-s opens a new window, the cursor stays in the PO file window. If the translator really wants to get into the program source window, she ought to do it explicitly, maybe by using command O.

When s is typed for the first time, or for a PO file entry which is different of the last one used for getting source context, then the command reacts by giving the first context available for this entry, if any. If some context has already been recently displayed for the current PO file entry, and the translator wandered off to do other things, typing s again will merely resume, in another window, the context last displayed.

In particular, if the translator moved the cursor away from the context in the source file, the command will bring the cursor back to the context. By using s many times in a row, with no other commands intervening, PO mode will cycle to the next available contexts for this particular entry, getting back to the first context once the last has been shown.

The command M-s behaves differently. Instead of cycling through references, it lets the translator choose a particular reference among many, and displays that reference. It is best used with completion, if the translator types TAB immediately after M-s , in response to the question, she will be offered a menu of all possible references, as a reminder of which are the acceptable answers. This command is useful only where there are really many contexts available for a single string to translate.

Program source files are usually found relative to where the PO file stands. As a special provision, when this fails, the file is also looked for, but relative to the directory immediately above it. Those two cases take proper care of most PO files.

However, it might happen that a PO file has been moved, or is edited in a different place than its normal location. When this happens, the translator should tell PO mode in which directory normally sits the genuine PO file. Many such directories may be specified, and all together, they constitute what is called the search path for program sources. The command S po-consider-source-path is used to interactively enter a new directory at the front of the search path, and the command M-S po-ignore-source-path is used to select, with completion, one of the directories she does not want anymore on the search path.

PO mode is able to help the knowledgeable translator, being fluent in many languages, at taking advantage of translations already achieved in other languages she just happens to know. It provides these other language translations as additional context for her own work.

Moreover, it has features to ease the production of translations for many languages at once, for translators preferring to work in this way.

An auxiliary PO file is an existing PO file meant for the same package the translator is working on, but targeted to a different mother tongue language. Commands exist for declaring and handling auxiliary PO files, and also for showing contexts for the entry under work.

Seek auxiliary files for another translation for the same entry po-cycle-auxiliary. Command A po-consider-as-auxiliary adds the current PO file to the list of auxiliary files, while command M-A po-ignore-as-auxiliary just removes it. The command a po-cycle-auxiliary seeks all auxiliary PO files, round-robin, searching for a translated entry in some other language having an msgid field identical as the one for the current entry. The found PO file, if any, takes the place of the current PO file in the display its window gets on top.

Before doing so, the current PO file is also made into an auxiliary file, if not already. So, a in this newly displayed PO file will seek another PO file, and so on, so repeating a will eventually yield back the original PO file. The command C-c C-a po-select-auxiliary asks the translator for her choice of a particular auxiliary file, with completion, and then switches to that selected PO file.

The command also checks if the selected file has an msgid field identical as the one for the current entry, and if yes, this entry becomes current.

Otherwise, the cursor of the selected file is left undisturbed. For all this to work fully, auxiliary PO files will have to be normalized, in that way that msgid fields should be written exactly the same way. It is possible to write msgid fields in various ways for representing the same string, different writing would break the proper behaviour of the auxiliary file commands of PO mode.

This is not expected to be much a problem in practice, as most existing PO files have their msgid entries written by the same GNU gettext tools. However, PO files initially created by PO mode itself, while marking strings in source files, are normalised differently. Until these discrepancies between PO mode and other GNU gettext tools get fully resolved, the translator should stay aware of normalisation issues.

A compendium is a special PO file containing a set of translations recurring in many different packages. The translator can use gettext tools to build a new compendium, to add entries to her compendium, and to initialize untranslated entries, or to update already translated entries, from translations kept in the compendium. Basically every PO file consisting of translated entries only can be declared as a valid compendium.

By default, msgcat will accumulate divergent translations for the same string. Those occurrences will be marked as fuzzy and highly visible decorated; calling msgcat on file1. A good compendium file must not contain fuzzy or untranslated entries. Nobody wants to translate the same messages again and again; thus you may wish to have a compendium file containing getopt.

To extract a message subset e. You can use a compendium file to initialize a translation from scratch or to update an already existing translation. Sometimes it is necessary to manipulate PO files in a way that is better performed automatically than by hand.

GNU gettext includes a complete set of tools for this purpose. Thus the maintainer must concatenate the two existing package translations into a single translation catalog, for each language. When a translator takes over the translation job from another translator, but she uses a different character encoding in her locale, she will convert the catalog to her character encoding.

When a maintainer takes a source file with tagged messages from another package, he should also take the existing translations for this source file and not let the translators do the same job twice.

When a translator wants to adjust some translation catalog for a special dialect or orthography — for example, German as written in Switzerland versus German as written in Germany — she needs to apply some text processing to every message in the catalog. Another use of msgfilter is to produce approximately the POT file for which a given PO file was made.

But the GNU gettext tools give an error when they encounter duplicate msgids in the same file and in the same domain. The msgcat program concatenates and merges the specified PO files.

It finds messages which are common to two or more of the specified PO files. By using the --more-than option, greater commonality may be requested before messages are printed.

Conversely, the --less-than option may be used to specify less commonality before messages are printed i. Translations, comments, extracted comments, and file positions will be cumulated, except that if --use-first is specified, they will be taken from the first PO file to define them. To concatenate POT files, better use xgettext , not msgcat , because msgcat would choke on the undefined charsets in the specified POT files.

Requests that only unique messages be printed. Use first available translation for each message. The msgconv program converts a translation catalog to a different character encoding. The msggrep program extracts all messages of a translation catalog that match a given pattern or belong to some given source files. When more than one selection criterion is specified, the set of selected messages is the union of the selected messages of each criterion.

Select messages extracted from sourcefile. Output only the messages that do not match any selection criterion, instead of the messages that match a selection criterion.

Also, the GNU system is not a single static set of programs; users and distributors may select different packages according to their needs and desires. The result is still a variant of the GNU system. The Directory is actively maintained by the Free Software Foundation and includes links to program home pages where available, as well as entries for all GNU packages.

Another list of all GNU packages is below. Free software documentation links are listed separately. Finally, we have a short list of free software replacements for proprietary software running on various proprietary systems. We have also published a list of recommended educational software. The FSF maintains a list of high-priority free software projects ; please help with these projects if you can. Using a common language is quite handy for communication between developers, maintainers and users from all countries.

On the other hand, most people are less comfortable with English than with their own native language, and would rather be using their mother tongue for day to day's work, as far as possible. Many would simply love seeing their computer screen showing a lot less of English, and far more of their own language. This package offers to programmers, translators, and even users, a well integrated set of tools and documentation.

Specifically, the GNU gettext utilities are a set of tools that provides a framework to help other GNU packages produce multi-lingual messages.