This is a po4a format plugin for Ren'Py, the visual novel engine. Ren'Py already provides excellent internationalization support, and its built‑in workflow is flexible and convenient for editing. So why does this plugin exist? It’s intended for people who prefer to edit translations in Emacs and rely on gettext PO mode to work effectively.

If you want to use this with po4a, you’re expected to already be familiar with po4a itself—it’s not aimed at casual users. In practice, you can add the lib directory to your PERL5LIB environment variable and use RenPy as the type entry in your po4a configuration file. It’s recommended to set the characters option so that msgctxt can be used.

At the moment, po4a does not support msgctxt, though support may eventually be added if mquinson/po4a#627 is merged.

I’m not planning to submit this as a pull request to the po4a project, since Ren’Py scripts aren’t technical documentation and fall outside po4a’s intended scope. That may change in the future, and if it does, this code can be integrated freely (by anyone). I will never assert any licensing claims or restrictions.

Copyright (C) 2026 gemmaro

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.