====== po2tmx ======

Convert Gettext PO files to a TMX translation memory file.  TMX is the Translation Memory 
eXchange format developed by [[http://lisa.org/|LISA]] (Localization Industry Standards Association)

===== Usage =====

  po2tmx [options] --language <target> <po> <tmx>

Where:
| <po>  | is a PO file  |
| <tmx>  | is a TMX file  |

Options:
| --version            | show program's version number and exit  |
| -h, --help           | show this help message and exit  |
| --manpage            | output a manpage based on the help  |
| [[--progress=PROGRESS]]  | show progress as: dots, none, bar, names, verbose  |
| [[--errorlevel=ERRORLEVEL]]  | show errorlevel as: none, message, exception, traceback  |
| -iINPUT, --input=INPUT   | read from INPUT in po, pot formats  |
| -xEXCLUDE, --exclude=EXCLUDE  | exclude names matching EXCLUDE from input paths  |
| -oOUTPUT, --output=OUTPUT     | write to OUTPUT in tmx format  |
| [[psyco_mode|--psyco=MODE]]         | use psyco to speed up the operation, modes: none, full, profile  |
| -lLANG, --language=LANG  | set target language code (e.g. af-ZA) [required]   |
| --source-language=LANG   | set source language code (default: en)  |

===== Examples =====

  po2tmx -l xh browser.po browser.tmx

Use the Xhosa (//xh//) translations in the PO file //browser.po// to create a TMX file called //browser.tmx//

===== Bugs and issues =====

==== Markup stripping ====

po2tmx conforms to TMX v1.4 without stripping markup.  See the [[tmx]] conformance page for more details.

It has not been widely tested so your mileage may vary.

==== TMX and PO in OmegaT ====

In some tools, like OmegaT, PO files are parsed without expanding escaped sequences, even though such tools use TMX for translation memory.  Keep this in mind when using po2tmx, because po2tmx converts \n and \t to newlines and tabs in the TMX file.  If such a TMX file is used while translating PO files in OmegaT, matching will be less than 100%.

In other tools, such as Swordfish, the PO comment "no-wrap" is interpreted in the same way as the equivalent function in XML, which may also lead to mismatches if TMXes from po2tmx are used.

There is nothing wrong with po2tmx, but if used in conjunction with tools that handle PO files differently, it may lead to less than perfect matching.

===== Tips =====

==== TMX with only unique segments ====

To create a TMX with no duplicates (in other words, only unique strings), use msgcat to first create a large PO file with non-uniques removed.

Steps for MS Windows:

1. Create a text file (say, allfiles.txt) that contains the paths of all the PO files (in Linux just use the "find" command).  The file should contain one path per line (relative or absolute).  In MS Windows, you can use [[PikyBasket]].  In MS Windows, make sure the file has no BOM.

2. Do: msgcat -f allfiles.txt -u -o bigpofile.po

3. Now do po2tmx on that bigpofile.po

===== The Toolkit's TMX versus other tools =====

Here is a page on [[support for toolkit tmx]] by other tools (mostly MS Windows).