# Opening and Saving Files

The ini-style language format requires that you open two files: one file (the "original") is displayed in the left list column and the other (the "translation") is displayed in the right list column in the top part of the program.

To open both the original and translation file at the same time, select Open Original (Ctrl+O) from the menu: you will be presented with two dialogs that allows you to first select the original file and then the translation file. If you only want to load the original file, click the Cancel button when the second dialog appears. If you already have the original file loaded and want to load another translation file, select Open Translation (Ctrl+Shift+O) instead.

The program matches the items in the translation to the items in the original by comparing their Section and Name (Sections are unique and so are Names within a Section. The comparison is not case-sensitive). Items not found in the original file is not displayed in the list. Instead, these items are available through Orphaned Items on the View menu.

Conversely, items from the original not found in the translation file, will show as empty items in the translation column. These items also have a light gray background color to quickly find them.

When you save the translation, these new items are saved as well. If you load a translation without first loading an original, the list will be empty. The program automatically opens the last opened files the next time you start it.

When opening and saving files, you can also choose an encoding for the file in the displayed dialog. You can choose between ANSI ("normal" text files), UTF-8 and Unicode. Only UTF-8 and Unicode files may contain a BOM. If you have a file without a BOM but you know for sure that it is Unicode or UTF-8, select the appropriate encoding when opening it.

When a file contains a BOM, the user selected encoding is ignored and the encoding specified by the BOM is used instead. Additionally, the default encoding for saving the file is adjusted to match. The encodings of the original and translation files are handled separately, so you can have an original file encoded as ANSI and a translation file encoded as Unicode or any other combination.

When saving to UTF-8 and Unicode, IniTranslator always includes the BOM.

Note

When saving a Unicode or UTF-8 file as ANSI, character information will most probably be lost.