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Overview

User scripts are relatively short pieces of code that can be installed, enabled, and disabled by individual users in order to modify the behavior of the Tatoeba user interface. These scripts can serve an important role in streamlining tasks that you do frequently and adding functionality that has not yet been incorporated into the main codebase. They typically are written and tested to work with the Mozilla Firefox browser, but can work with other browsers as well. You will need to install the Greasemonkey add-on. See next section for more details.

Greasemonkey

Visit the Greasemonkey add-on page to install Greasemonkey. The userscripts.org Greasemonkey guide provides additional information. Some scripts require editing for customization.

Finding scripts

At the moment, the best way of finding a current, comprehensive list of Tatoeba-related scripts is to search the website userscripts.org for scripts tagged "Tatoeba". To see a discussion of individual scripts, see the next section.

Also see a4esl.com/temporary/tatoeba/userscripts/ (Someone should eventually add all of these to these page.)

Description of selected scripts

Scripts for linking sentences

Users with "advanced contributor" status or higher can link multiple sentences to a single translation. (To request an upgrade in status, send a private message to alexmarcelo.) Linking is preferable to the creation of duplicate sentences with the same text.

The native default Tatoeba interface makes it easy to link sentences that are indirect translations (i.e., that have a translation in common), which appear on the same page as the main sentence. However, linking sentences that are not indirect translations requires many more steps. (This situation arises frequently because an indirect translation is not displayed on the same page as a main sentence until sentences are indexed, which only occurs on a periodic basis.)

There are several user scripts that fill in the gap to make it easier to link sentences that are not displayed as indirect translations. Two are described here.

Both scripts allow you to copy a sentence number into a field. Tatoeba Flexible Linker alternatively lets you copy in a full URL from which the sentence number will be extracted. One way to copy the URL of a sentence is to right-click a link to it and select the "Copy Link Location" option (whose name will differ from one browser to another). If you are on the main page of a sentence, its URL will be in the bar at the top of the page. In this case, you can click to select the entire URL or double-click on the sentence number at the end to select the number by itself.

Tatoeba Visual Linker (author: jakov/jakovo) This script offers two alternative ways to link sentences. Pick one and you are good to go.

The first one is the Shopping cart method.

Go to the sentence you would like to link (Sentence A) and click on the shopping cart icon above the sentence (). Now the sentence is in your shopping cart and it goes wherever you go. Go to the sentence you would like to link to (Sentence B). If everything is right, you should be seeing Sentence A at the end of the translations, as if it were an indirect translation. Click the chain icon () to link A to B. It is that simple.

The second one is the Manual method. If you already know the sentence number of Sentence A, this method could be faster.

Go to the sentence you would like to link to (Sentence B). Click on the form area icon next to the shopping cart (). You should see a form area at the end of the translations. Type the sentence number here and click on the socket icon (). Now you should see the sentence itself. Click the chain icon () to link A to B. Again, it is that simple.

If you want to empty the shopping cart, simply double click the shopping cart icon. If you want to remove a sentence from your cart, click on the cart icon () on the right of the sentence.

Other scripts

Tatoeba Default Languages (author: FlamingTofu) moves your desired languages to the top of the language drop-down lists. You need to edit the script once to list the languages you desire.
Tatoeba Search Language Switcher (author: Pandark) replaces the single-headed arrow between the two language fields at the top of the screen with a double-headed arrow. Clicking on the double-headed arrow swaps the values in the "From" and "To" fields. The script does not require any editing.
Tatoeba Sentence Timeline (author: jakov, known as jakovo at userscripts.org) places log entries and tags chronologically between the comments on a sentence. The script does not require any editing.
Tatoeba Symbol Insert Helper (author: jakov/jakovo) adds links for inserting special characters into the Tatoeba translation boxes. It can optionally be edited in order to remove unwanted character sets from the list, add new ones to the list, or modify the order in which they appear.
htmlTatoebaQuiz (author: marcelostockle/Marcelo Stöckle) quizzes the user.
Tatoeba Suggest Tags of Siblings (author: jakov/jakovo) lists the tags which have already been added to direct translations (in green, like: ) and indirect translations (in grey, like: ), so that you can easily pick one for the active sentence. When you hover on a tag added to the active sentence, it also makes it possible to see the name of the contributor who added it. For tags added to direct and indirect translations, hovering will highlight the related sentence. Similarly hovering on a sentence number in the logs will highlight the sentence with this ID. The script will add a control panel on your profile for determining preferences.

Making requests

For the time being, place requests involving creation or modification of scripts on the page User script requests. Eventually, we can use a more sophisticated tracking system.

Deprecated scripts

Tatoeba Flexible Linker (author: AlanF_US) adds a box below the main sentence with a "show" arrow and a "link" button () and an empty text field. The user can type (or copy) the number (e.g., '10000000') or URL (e.g., 'http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/10000000') of a sentence into the field. After this, clicking on the "show" arrow will visit the other sentence, while clicking on the "link" button will link it to the one above. It is an updated version of Zifre's Tatoeba Linker, which is no longer actively maintained. However, enabling it tends to disable certain important links, such as "unlink" icons. The author recommends using bookmarklets instead.