Tips and tricks

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:

• Unix / Linux / Mac OSX: ~/.virtaal/
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Virtaal for example:
  • C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Virtaal
  • C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Virtaal

To disable some functionality like autocorrect, go to the Preferences and deselect it from the list of plugins.

Alternatively, you can edit virtaal.ini. Under the heading ”[plugin_state]”, add a line:

autocorrect = disabled

You can edit the information put into the PO headers. Since Virtaal 0.4, these can be edited inside Virtaal at the Preferences.

For older versions, edit virtaal.init 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.

You can specify your own font settings to use in the translation area. Since Virtaal 0.4, these can be edited inside Virtaal at 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.