|  |  | 13 Customizing Ipe

# 13 Customizing Ipe

A few features of the Ipe user interface can be changed in the Preferences dialog (in the Help menu).

Ipe contains support for localizing the user interface into another language. Contact me if you wish to do such a localization project.

The keyboard shortcuts used by Ipe can be customized to your personal taste. From the command line, run Ipe as

    ipe -savekeys ipekeys.qm

This will save Ipe's untranslated keys into the file ipekeys.qm. Translate ipekeys.qm into XML format using `qm2ts` (from Qt 3), edit the resulting ipekeys.ts file (you can discard definitions you do not wish to change, but see the note in the example below), and compile back into .qm format using `lrelease`. Install the resulting file as .ipe/ipekeys.qm in your home directory, and restart Ipe.

Here is an example of an edited ipekeys.ts by Kostas Oikonomou:

    <!DOCTYPE TS><TS>
    <context>
        <name>Key</name>
        <message>
            <source>Ctrl+V</source>
            <comment>Edit|Paste</comment>
            <translation>F18</translation>
        </message>
        <message>
            <source>Ctrl+X</source>
            <comment>Edit|Cut</comment>
            <translation>F20</translation>
        </message>
        <comment>
        If this is not here, although it's unchanged from the default setting,
        File|New Window will show as Ctrl+X,Ctrl+C, because of the translation for
        File|Exit, which also has source "none".  Tricky!  Same goes for other
        similar situations.
        </comment>
        <message>
            <source>none</source>
            <comment>File|New Window</comment>
            <translation>none</translation>
        </message>
        <message>
            <source>none</source>
            <comment>File|Save as bitmap</comment>
            <translation>none</translation>
        </message>
        <message>
            <source>none</source>
            <comment>File|Exit</comment>
            <translation>Ctrl+X,Ctrl+C</translation>
        </message>
    </context>
    </TS>

If you are using Qt version 3.1.0 or higher (see Help menu, About Ipe if you don't know), you can use shortcuts consisting of more than one key, such as Ctrl+X,Ctrl+C as in the example above (use commas to separate the key presses--up to four are supported).

|  |  | 13 Customizing Ipe