November 28, 2004 10:37 PM

l10n@2.0: PO files and working with them

This diary entry will be the basis of the documentation for POT/PO files handling and OpenOffice.org translation using them. Please send comments to dev@l10n.

OpenOffice.org comes with POT files (see FTP server which is mirroring my directory at ftp.linux.cz). Download the latest file (right now, it is OpenOffice.org-SRC680_m63-POT.tar.gz) and unpack it somewhere. It contains POT files (*.pot) and the file en-US.sdf. You need en-US.sdf to generate GSI/SDF file you can then use while building your localized version of OpenOffice.org.

POT files contain entries like
#: sdslots.src#SID_INSERTFILE.sfxslotinfo.text
msgid "File"
msgstr ""
This particular POT entry comes from file pot/sd/sdi.pot. What does it mean? The module sd contains directory sdi which contains translatable texts.

Texts to be translated are stored inside localize.sdf files in the source code. They are extracted using mechanism that is still to be described (it already is implemented in my build system, but I haven't yet described it). But anyway: it is not that important for translators, because they only need POT files.

Back to sample POT entry: the line starting with #: allows people to look for the string inside OpenOffice.org source code. This particular string comes from sd/sdi/sdslots.src, and has identifier SID_INSERTFILE. The string itself is "File" (see msgid). The translation it empty, because it is POT file (PO Template). PO files look very similar, but they have msgstr line filled in with the translation.

How to generate PO files for translators from these POT files? I wrote a script called POT2PO which can be used for two tasks:
  • generating new PO files when you are starting with the translation
  • updating existing PO files to newer version of POT files
Just read its commentary section and run it. You'll end up with new/updated po directory with new PO files. Now you translate them, generate GSI/SDF file and build with it. And that's all.

If you have any questions, please ask on dev@l10n. Thanks for your feedback! -----

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: OpenOffice.org