Scripts in OmegaT (quick guide)

A quick and easy intro to OmegaT scripts:

  1. OmegaT comes bundled with several scripts. Some of them are of little practical use as they are included as examples for users willing to write their own scripts.
  2. The bundled scripts are located in scripts subfolder of the folder where OmegaT is installed. Often the installation is done in a location where a regular user doesn’t have write permissions, which means adding and removing scripts can be complicated.
  3. Luckily, OmegaT permits setting an arbitrary location for scripts. Do that! It can be any location where you can write to. It doesn’t matter if it contains no scripts at the moment: you can add only the ones you need, and only as you need them.
    It makes sense to place the scripts folder into the OmegaT config folder (the folder where OmegaT stores its settings) just for convenience.

    But it can, of course, be any other folder.
  4. Copy the scripts you need to the folder that was set for scripts.
    If you’re downloading from GitHub, you might need to show the desired script in raw format, and then save the page. If it saves as filename.groovy.txt, just remove the .txt part. If the file got saved in your Downloads folder, just move it into the folder set for your scripts.
  5. In OmegaT, open Tools → Scripting, in the newly open Scripting window select the script you need (left part of the window) and hit Run (lower left corner).
  6. If you need to run a script quite often, there is a way to assign shortcuts to up to 12 scripts:
    Select the script you want to run with a shortcut
    Right-click on one of the 12 buttons in the lower part of the Scripting window
    Select “Add Script”
  7. The script thus installed is available under Tools, or can be run by pressing Control+Shift+Fn (Fn is a function key at the top of the keyboard, n is a number between 1 and 12, and the number on the button in the Scripting window corresponds to the number on the function key)

Select Source Text in #OmegaT

There might be a number of situations when the whole text of the current segment’s source is needed for something other than translation itself: performing concordance or web search, writing a translation note in another application, asking your client or project manager about the text, etc.

Currently, in OmegaT it can be achieved in several fairly easy ways:

  • Selecting the text with the mouse (but who wants to do that?)
  • Inserting the source text into the target area (Ctrl+Shift+I or Ctrl+Shift+R) and selecting the text there
  • Unlocking the text caret with F2, and then using arrow buttons and Shift to select the text
    (If you want to have the caret unlocked by default when you start OmegaT, there’s a way to do it)

All that is fine, but it would be much nicer to have a simple shortcut to select that source text, similar to what Ctrl+A does (which in OmegaT Editor selects everything only in the target field, or the complete textual contents of other panes if the got focus). I’ve written a simple script that does just that, and though scripts can be bound only to Ctrl+Shift+F[1-12] keys, it’s better than not having a shortcut at all. Hopefully, this function might appear in OmegaT itself, but before it happened, here you have it:
Get it from SF.net
Get it from GitHub

To learn how to install and use OmegaT scripts, see this quick guide.

Happy selecting!

A [slightly more] sane initial OmegaT setup. Part I

Over the years of my daily use of OmegaT (I started using it back in 2009), I helped quite a few translators to make their first steps with the program. The funny thing is that almost every time a new person tries to learn the program, we change some of the same defaults to make it more usable and comfortable. So I thought it might be a good idea to collect those few initial setup changes here as a small series of posts so that anyone could refer to them at any point.

The first thing I always have new users change is the Editor behavior.

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