(gettext.info)Files

---

Next: Overview Prev: Aspects Up: Introduction

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

1.4 Files Conveying Translations
================================

   The letters PO in ‘.po’ files means Portable Object, to distinguish
it from ‘.mo’ files, where MO stands for Machine Object.  This paradigm,
as well as the PO file format, is inspired by the NLS standard developed
by Uniforum, and first implemented by Sun in their Solaris system.

   PO files are meant to be read and edited by humans, and associate
each original, translatable string of a given package with its
translation in a particular target language.  A single PO file is
dedicated to a single target language.  If a package supports many
languages, there is one such PO file per language supported, and each
package has its own set of PO files.  These PO files are best created by
the ‘xgettext’ program, and later updated or refreshed through the
‘msgmerge’ program.  Program ‘xgettext’ extracts all marked messages
from a set of C files and initializes a PO file with empty translations.
Program ‘msgmerge’ takes care of adjusting PO files between releases of
the corresponding sources, commenting obsolete entries, initializing new
ones, and updating all source line references.  Files ending with ‘.pot’
are kind of base translation files found in distributions, in PO file
format.

   MO files are meant to be read by programs, and are binary in nature.
A few systems already offer tools for creating and handling MO files as
part of the Native Language Support coming with the system, but the
format of these MO files is often different from system to system, and
non-portable.  The tools already provided with these systems don’t
support all the features of GNU ‘gettext’.  Therefore GNU ‘gettext’ uses
its own format for MO files.  Files ending with ‘.gmo’ are really MO
files, when it is known that these files use the GNU format.