Ubuntu Manpage: tlk2xml — BioWare TLK to XML converter

Provided by: xoreos-tools_0.0.5-1build4_amd64

NAME

     tlk2xml — BioWare TLK to XML converter

SYNOPSIS

     tlk2xml [options] input_file [output_file]

DESCRIPTION

tlk2xml converts BioWare's TLK files into human-readable XML. TLK are “talk tables”, a list
of strings indexed by an ID, used for all user-visible text in a BioWare game. All strings
for a campaign or module are usually collected in one file for each supported language, and
languages with sentences that vary wildly depending on whether the player character is male
or female use a second TLK with strings for the female version.

There's two distinct TLK formats. One is a whole separate file format (which uses version
IDs V3.0 and V4.0), the other is a GFF (and uses version IDs V0.2 and V0.5). Within those
two major versions, the differences are smaller: V4.0 removed fields for each string not
needed anymore, and V0.5 compresses strings using a Huffman tree. This tool can read all of
these variants and produces a human-read XML file.

Because these files contain localized string data, it is important to know the encoding of
those strings. Unfortunately, the TLK files do not contain information about the encoding.
Version 3.0 and 4.0 contain a language identifier, but the meaning of that varies between
games. V0.2 and V0.5 even lack those completely. However, due to the Huffman-nature of
V0.5 strings, the encoding there is fixed to little-endian UTF-16, and strings in V0.2 files
are also usually in little-endian UTF-16 (with the exceptions of files found in the Nintendo
DS game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood). To manually select the encoding, this tool
provides a wide range command line options for various encodings.

Alternatively, the game this TLK is from can be specified and tlk2xml will read the strings
in an appropriate encoding for that game and the language ID found in the TLK. Please note
that this does not work for the game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, since its TLK
files do not provide a language ID.

OPTIONS

-h
--help
Show a help text and exit.
--version
Show version information and exit.
--cp1250
Read strings as Windows CP-1250. Eastern European, Latin alphabet.
--cp1251
Read strings as Windows CP-1251. Eastern European, Cyrillic alphabet.
--cp1252
Read strings as Windows CP-1252. Western European, Latin alphabet.
--cp932
Read strings as Windows CP-932. Japanese, extended Shift-JIS.
--cp936
Read strings as Windows CP-936. Simplified Chinese, extended GB2312 with GBK
codepoints.
--cp949
Read strings as Windows CP-949. Korean, similar to EUC-KR.
--cp950
Read strings as Windows CP-950. Traditional Chinese, similar to Big5.
--utf8
Read strings as UTF-8.
--utf16le
Read strings as little-endian UTF-16.
--utf16be
Read strings as big-endian UTF-16.
--nwn
Read strings in an encoding appropriate for Neverwinter Nights.
--nwn2
Read strings in an encoding appropriate for Neverwinter Nights 2.
--kotor
Read strings in an encoding appropriate for Knights of the Old Republic.
--kotor2
Read strings in an encoding appropriate for Knights of the Old Republic II.
--jade
Read strings in an encoding appropriate for Jade Empire.
--witcher
Read strings in an encoding appropriate for The Witcher.
--dragonage
Read strings in an encoding appropriate for Dragon Age: Origins.
--dragonage2
Read strings in an encoding appropriate for Dragon Age II.
input_file
The TLK file to convert.
output_file
The XML file will be written there. If no output file is specified, the XML data is
written to stdout. The encoding of the XML stream is always UTF-8.

EXAMPLES

     Convert the CP-1252 TLK file1.tlk into an XML file:

           $ tlk2xml --cp1252 file1.tlk file2.xml

     Convert the UTF-16LE TLK file1.tlk into an XML file on stdout:

           $ tlk2xml --utf16le file1.tlk

     Convert the TLK file1.tlk from Neverwinter Nights into an XML file:

           $ tlk2xml --nwn file1.tlk file2.xml

     Convert the UTF-8 TLK file1.tlk into an XML file on stdout, modify it using sed(1) and use
     xml2tlk(1) to write it back into a TLK:

           $ tlk2xml --utf8 file1.tlk | sed -e 's/gold/candy/g' | xml2tlk \
             --utf8 --version30 file2.tlk

AUTHORS