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# pocompendium

Takes a directory of translated PO files and creates a single PO files called a PO compendium. This compendium can be used to review word choice conflicts or as input during a merge using pomigrate2.

## Prerequisites

GNU Gettext:

- msgsttrib
- msgcat
- msghack (may not be present on your installation of Gettext, but is only required for the invert command)
- msgfilter

## Usage

    pocompendium [options] output.po <-d po-directory(ies)|po-file(s)>

Where:

output.po | the name of the output PO compendium
po-directory(ies) | one or more directories to use as input for the compendium
po-file(s) | one or more PO files to use as input for the compendium

Options:

-v, --invert | swap the msgid and msgstr in the input PO files
-e, --errors | only return those msg blocks that have conflicts
-i, --ignore-case | drops all msgstr's to lowercase
-st, -tilde, --strip-accel-amp | remove all & style accelerator markers
-sa, -amp, --strip-accel-tilde | remove all ~ style accelerator markers
-su, --strip-accel-under | remove all _ style accelerator markers

## Examples

1. Compendium creation --- create a compendium with all your translations to use as input during a message merge either when migrating an existing project or starting a new one.
2. Conflicting translations --- use - -errors to find where you have translated an English string differently. Many times this is OK but often it will pick up subtle spelling mistakes or help you to migrate older translations to a newer choice of words
3. Conflicting word choice --- use - -invert and - -errors to get a compendium file that show how you have used a translated word for different English words. You might have chosen a word that is valid for both of the English expressions but that in the context of computers would cause confusion for the user. You can now easily identify these words and make changes in the underlying translations.

## Narrowing Results

PO files treat slight changes in capitalisation, accelerator, punctuation and whitespace as different translations. In cases 2) and 3) above it is sometimes useful to remove the inconsistencies so that you can focus on the errors in translation not on shifts in capitals. To this end you can use the following: --ignore-case, --strip-accel-amp, --strip-accel-tilde, --strip-accel-under

## Operation

pocompendium makes use of the Gettext tool msgcat to perform its task. It traverses the PO directories and cat's all found PO files into the single compendium output file. It then uses msgattrib to extract only certain messages, msghack to invert messages and msgfilter to convert messages to lowercase.

## Bugs

There are some absolute/relative path name issues