# General Usage

The tools follow a general usage convention which is helpful to understand.

## Input & Output

The last two arguments of your command are the input and output files/directories:

    moz2po <input> <output>

You can of course still use the `-i` and `-o` options which allows you to reorder commands

    moz2po -o <output> -i <input>

## Error Reporting

All tools accept the option `--errorlevel`. If you find a bug, add this option and send the traceback to the developers.

    moz2po <other-options> --errorlevel=traceback

## Templates

If you are working with any file format and you wish to preserve comments and layout then use your source file as a template.

    po2dtd -t <source-file> <input> <output>

This will use the files in `<source-file>` as a template, merge the PO files in `<input>`, and create new DTD files in `<output>`

If you ran this without the templates you would get valid DTD files but they would not preserve the layout or all the comments from the source DTD file

The same concept of templates is also used when you merge files.

    pomerge -t <old> <fixes> <new>

This would take the `<old>` files merge in the `<fixes>` and output new PO files, preserving formatting, into `<new>`. You can use the same directory for `<old>` and `<new>` if you want the merges to overwrite files in `<old>`.

## source2target

The converters all follow this convention:

- source = the format from which you are converting e.g. in oo2po we are converting from OpenOffice.org SDF/GSI

- target = the format into which you are converting e.g. in oo2po we are converting to Gettext PO

## Getting Help

The `--help` option will always list the available commands for the tool.

    moz2po --help