This page mentions some tips and tricks to get the most out of Virtaal. Some hidden features mentioned here might just make you a little more productive, or help you to customise things to be exactly the way you want.
Some of these features mention how to make changes to a configuration file for Virtaal. Depending on the version of Virtaal, you might be able to do the same inside Virtaal in the Preferences dialog. You can use any text editor to make these changes. These files are stored in the following directory on your system:
| Platform | Location |
|---|---|
| Unix / Linux | ~/.virtaal/ |
| Mac OS X | ~/Library/Application Support/Virtaal/ or
~/.virtaal/ |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\Virtaal for example:
C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Virtaal
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Virtaal |
Most features are available via easy shortcuts.
Close Virtaal. Then find the directory with all your settings and the file
tm.db (your translation memory database). Copy the contents of the whole
directory to the corresponding directory on the other account/computer.
To disable some functionality like autocorrect, go to the Preferences and deselect it from the list of plugins.
Alternatively, you can edit virtaal.ini:
[plugin_state]
autocorrect = disabled
You can modify the information put into the PO headers using Virtaal’s Preferences window.
For older versions, edit virtaal.ini and look for the settings name,
email and team. The field for the team can contain a description of
your team and a URL or a mailing list address – anything really.
The best way to change the language of the Virtaal interface, is to change the locale of your system. For Windows, this is done in the Control Center under the Regional Settings, for example.
Changed in version 0.7.
You can specify a language for the interface that is different from the
language of the system. To do this, first ensure that Virtaal is closed
entirely. Then open the file virtaal.ini and edit the setting uilang
under the [language] heading. Note that native window dialogs
only work when this is not set, or set to the system’s language.
[language]
uilang = fr
You can specify your own font settings to use in the translation area. These can be edited inside Virtaal in the Preferences.
For older versions, edit virtaal.ini, and look for the settings
sourcefont and targetfont. You can therefore set the font and font size
separately for the source and target language if you wish to do so. Valid
settings could look something like this:
targetfont = monospace 11
targetfont = georgia 12
targetfont = dejavu serif,italic 9
If you want to receive suggestions more often, even if they are not very
similar to what you are translating, edit plugins.ini and lower the setting
for min_quality.
If you want to receive more suggestions at a time, edit plugins.ini and
increase the setting for max_matches.
Note that you can specify these same parameters for most of the individual
sources of TM suggestions. Try adding or editing these settings in tm.ini
under a heading corresponding to the name of the plugin.
Do you wish the suggestions from Open-Tran.eu could come faster? The speed of this translation memory plugin depends a lot on your network connection. One way that could help to make it faster, is to avoid DNS lookups. You can do that by adding open-tran.eu into your hosts file.
85.214.16.47 open-tran.eu
(or whatever the IP address of open-tran.eu is)
If you don’t know about hosts files and their syntax, it might be best not to play with this setting.