The K Desktop Environment

4.2. Editor

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

4.2.1. General

There is only one checkbox which sets if fuzzy status is reseted automatically at first character input in msgstr editor. When this option is disabled you have to manually choose Edit->Unset Fuzzy Status or press the Ctrl-U shortcut. This means the string ", fuzzy" is removed from the entry's comment.

4.2.2. 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 msgid viewer and msgstr editor. If don't have a monochrome display or have a visual impairment, you should enable this option.

Highlight background

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

Mark whitespace with points

When you feel the need to count spaces right from an eye or background highlighting is not your taste, then you can check this option to view whitespaces filled with points. Note that point is a point sign in the center of a character box, and not a decimal point.

Show surrounding quotes

If you think that viewing terminal char in msgstr or msgids text line is better for you then check this option to view surrounding quotes for every text line. Same thing if your experience editing PO files with ordinary text editors make you feel safe if you can track starting and ending double quotes in PO entry lines.

For 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 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 MsgID view and MsgStr editor. For general background color of edit box you must use 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 incorrectly characters.

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. First letter after (&) is colorized to highlight the character, that is used in combination with the ALT key.

The status for the current edited entry is marked by two LEDs. For your convenience you can choose where to put these LEDs: in statusbar or in editor (between msgid and msgstr entry). If have difficulties to view some colors or you want to make sure you can track LED status changes easily without moving your eye, you can select the prefered color using the color button chooser.

4.2.3. Fonts

This is a classic 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 recomended 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.