focal (1) tlk2xml.1.gz

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

SEE ALSO

     gff2xml(1), ssf2xml(1), xml2tlk(1)

     More information about the xoreos project can be found on its website: https://xoreos.org/.

AUTHORS

     This program is part of the xoreos-tools package, which in turn is part of the xoreos project, and was
     written by the xoreos team.  Please see the AUTHORS file for details.