# Preferences and Catalog Settings

### Preferences Dialog

(Available through File/Preferences in the menu.)

You can set various options that affect poEdit globally and are not related to opened catalog in Preferences. There are three tabs in the dialog box, one for each setting group.

- Editor
  - Identity
    Set your name and e-mail address. This is used to fill int `Last Translator' record in catalog's header.
  - Behavior
    Affects various aspects of poEdit's behavior. Automatically compile .mo file on save will cause poEdit to run the `msgfmt` utility to convert .po files to .mo ones (which is what you have to done before you can use catalogs in your application). Show summary after catalog update enables small window with information about added and removed translations after doing update. Open catalogs manager on poEdit startup does exactly what it says - if enabled, poEdit won't start up with its main window opened but will launch the manager instead. Always change focus to text input field affects keyboard navigation and is discussed in the beginning of UI Overview section.
  - CR/LF conversion
    Lets you choose prefered text file formatting (catalogs will be saved with this formatting). Among supported formats are Windows/DOC, Mac and Unix line endings. If you check Don't change format of existing catalogs, this option will only affect newly created files. It is recommended to use Unix format, since PO files came from Unix environment.
- Translation Memory
  You can setup translation memory's behavior on this tab. Please refer to TM section for details.
- Parsers (Warning: for experienced users only!)
  Most importantly, you can edit source code parsers in this dialog. Parsers are used when updating catalogs in poEdit (see Updating Catalog) and they take care of extracting strings from source code. By default only C and C++ programming languages are supported (through gettext `xgettext` utility). The dialog for editing parsers explains in detail how to fill in required information -- if in doubt, refer to C/C++ parser which may serve as a complex example of parser definition.

### Catalog Settings

(Available through Catalog/Settings in the menu.)

This dialog lets you edit catalog specific settings. "Project info" page contains information from catalog's header and the only really important information here is the charset.

"Paths" and "Keywords" pages are meaningful only if you are going to use the catalog update feature. "Paths" page lets you specify in what directories should parsers look for source file. Note that the paths in list box are relative to the base path, so if you set basepath to `../../poEdit` and add these two paths into the list box:

    src
    include

it will recursively search for source files in following directories:

    ../../poEdit/src
    ../../poEdit/include

The base path is relative to the directory where .po catalog file resists.

"Keywords" let you specify additional keywords understood by the parser. See GNU gettext documentation section of the manual for the meaning of keywords. By default, `xgettext` parser understands `_`, `gettext` and `gettext_noop` keywords. You may leave this page empty.

Note that specifying language or editing anything at "Paths" or "Keywords" panels will cause poEdit to save .po.poedit file.