Settings

← Guide index · 中文 · at the very bottom of the navigation bar

From top to bottom, the Settings page has four parts — Application (this computer), Current project, Data and About — each grouped into cards.

Shared account

Open Settings on the start page, or Settings → Application while editing a project, to register, sign in, sign out or change your nickname. Qonlang and Qonsona use the same account, with separate sign-ins in each app.

Usernames use 3–32 English letters, numbers or underscores and are case-insensitive; passwords use 10–128 characters. Signing in to Qonlang is optional. Local projects remain editable offline. Account requests do not upload or cloud-sync projects, lexicons or language content; Qonsona collections and leaderboards use the shared account service.

The public account service uses HTTPS for registration, sign-in, sign-out and nickname changes. Local projects, study-pack export and offline editing remain available without a connection.

The main process encrypts credentials using system secure storage. When it is unavailable, the app indicates a temporary session and you will need to sign in again after closing the app. Going offline does not block local editing. Offline sign-out removes local credentials and clearly reports whether remote revocation has been confirmed.

Support development

Choose Support development on the start page or in the project’s right-hand inspector sidebar to open a separate page. Returning restores your project and the page you were working on.

After signing in, enter an amount in Chinese yuan (CNY 0.01–600, up to two decimal places), review the confirmation and create the order. YunGouOS provides a WeChat payment code, which is rendered locally; scan it with WeChat. Contributions support Qonlang development, do not grant Qonsona tickets and do not change project content.

The server verifies payment signatures and queries the payment channel before confirming payment. Hiding the code or leaving the page does not cancel an order; return to view the original order, refresh its status or request closure of an unpaid order. Codes have a ten-minute checkout window, after which the server continues reconciliation. If connectivity or the result is uncertain, refresh the original order to avoid duplicate payment.

1. Application (stored in the data folder, per computer)

Interface

Item	Description
Interface language	Nine: 中文 / 繁體中文 / English / 日本語 / 한국어 / Français / Español / Русский / العربية. Traditional Chinese is converted from Simplified automatically (Taiwan wording) and follows it; the rest are translated entry by entry. Anything not covered falls back (Traditional → Simplified, the rest → English) rather than showing a key name. With Arabic only the text itself runs right to left (each paragraph follows its first strong character, so Latin letters and numbers inside it stay as they are); the navigation and inspector stay where they are. Either Chinese opens the Chinese guide from the User guide buttons; the others open this English guide. The same goes for the changelog on the start page and the documents of the example projects, which are shown in English when the interface isn’t Chinese. On first launch the interface language follows the system: one of these nine if the system language is among them, otherwise English
Light or dark	Follow system / Light / Dark; the theme’s palette switches according to this (this item was called Theme before 0.12.1, renamed so it no longer clashes with the Theme module)
When a sentence of the day is too long	What the start page’s sentence of the day does with a sentence that doesn’t fit on one line: Only pick ones that fit (default; if none fit, they are cut short instead) / Cut it short (between words) (split by the project’s word splitting, never in the middle of a word, followed by “…”) / Wrap onto more lines (the card grows taller). Whether a sentence fits is measured with the real font
Show the “?” usage hints next to panels	The small round question marks next to modules and inspector panels, each giving a one-line explanation on hover
Show the guided tour every time User guide is clicked	Off by default: each module’s tour runs automatically only once, and after that User guide opens this site directly; turned on, the tour runs every time. The checkbox in the dialog at the end of a tour is the same switch

Saving & startup

Item	Description
Autosave interval	In seconds; 0 turns it off. The crash-recovery snapshot every 5 seconds is independent of this
Backups to keep	Before every save, the previous file is copied to Backups/; beyond this number, the oldest are deleted
Reopen last project on launch

Updates

Item	Description
Check for new versions automatically	A few seconds after launch the app asks GitHub whether there is an update, then keeps asking every few minutes while it is open, and shows a notice at the bottom right as soon as a new version is out. After Later, the same version isn’t shown again during this session; Skip this version never shows it again; the whole check can be turned off here. A regular release is only offered regular releases; a test build (a version with -beta in it) is offered later test builds and regular releases. For downloading and installing, see Updates below; to check right away, use Check for updates now under About
Check for new versions every … minutes	20 minutes by default (it used to be 5; unchanged settings are moved to 20 on upgrade), 1–1440 allowed; has no effect while automatic checks are off

Display

Item	Description
Register labels on entry cards	Default: a boxed short form — the first character in Chinese (文, 古), abbreviations in English (lit., arch.); choose Boxed full name to write them out in full
Pronunciation brackets	Phonemic /…/ (default), Phonetic […], or none; both entry cards and the lexicon’s pronunciation column follow it
Examples shown under an entry	3 by default; an entry lists this many, and the rest are under See all examples
Examples under an entry also show the script line and where they come from (like the corpus page)	Off by default. With it on, each example gains a line above it with the language’s scripts, and its source after it (see Lexicon · Example sentences)
Highlight duplicate entries	Rows with identical headwords in the lexicon are shaded pale yellow; turned off, only the warning icon remains
Show the history row on entry cards	On by default: when the etymology can be run through the sound changes down to this entry, the card lists the form at every stage (see Lexicon · History); turn it off to hide that block
Mark paradigm-derived forms with a gear ⚙	Distinguishes derived values from hand-entered ones on the entry card; turn it off if you don’t want the mark

Window and panel sizes (inspector width, lexicon column widths, the chosen theme) are also kept in your local preferences and restored next time. By default the inspector width follows the window: the main area keeps enough width for pages such as Languages and Settings (960), and the rest goes to the inspector (between 360 and 900), so the two line up exactly unless the window is very wide. Once you drag the divider, your width is used; double-click the divider to follow the window again. Widths saved by older versions switch back to following the window once when upgrading. The side panel on the start page does not change. On a first start the window size follows the screen: 1853 × 920 on a 2K screen (2560 × 1440), and the same proportions of any other screen (on a high-DPI screen it is computed in logical pixels, so it takes up the same amount of the screen), never below 900 × 600, and the whole work area if the screen is smaller. Windows saved by older versions that are smaller than the default are enlarged once.

Updates

The notice shows this version’s release notes (in Chinese when the interface is Chinese, otherwise in English), with a line below reminding you that the installer comes from GitHub, which can be slow or unreachable on some networks. Click Download & install:

1. The installer is downloaded inside the app; nothing happens until you click. Before the actual download starts (an incremental update first works out what to fetch), and while the downloaded file is being checked, the notice says Verifying…; the progress bar only appears once downloading really starts. An installed Windows version only downloads the parts that differ from the previous version (usually just a megabyte or two for small changes), and checks the reassembled file against the checksum on the Release. If it doesn’t match, the Release lacks update information, or anything goes wrong along the way, it switches to downloading the full installer automatically — so what gets installed is always identical to the installer on the Release. This applies from the update after an installed 0.8.1 release onwards; older versions and locally built packages still download the full installer. macOS downloads the full zip for your chip (the native build if you are running the Intel build on Apple silicon) and checks it against the sha256 that GitHub computes for the file. How each download went is recorded in update.log in the data folder;
2. Once downloaded, the current project is saved first (installing closes the app; your project files are never touched): a project that has been saved before is saved in place; a project that has never been saved asks for a location with Save as, and cancelling asks “This resets the update progress. Continue?” — continue to skip the install this time, or cancel to get the Save as dialog again;
3. Windows installs silently and reopens automatically, using your previous install folder and options. macOS unpacks the zip, checks that it is a complete new version, and after quitting replaces Qonlang in its original location with the new one and reopens automatically (if the replacement fails, the old app is put back; this applies from the update after 0.8.3 is installed). If Qonlang sits somewhere it can’t be replaced — opened directly from the dmg or from the Downloads folder (macOS moves such apps to a read-only temporary location), or in a folder without write permission — it downloads the dmg instead and opens it, and the notice tells you to drag Qonlang into Applications to replace the old one; after that it is the same as Getting started · Installing and launching (including the Gatekeeper workaround). On Linux, the folder containing the downloaded package is opened.

An update check first looks at where GitHub’s “latest release” page redirects to, which doesn’t count against GitHub’s API limit (without signing in, the API allows only 60 requests per hour per network address, which several people sharing a proxy or campus network use up quickly). Only when that version is newer does it ask the API once for the installer checksums and release notes; if the API is rate-limited or unreachable, it finds this computer’s installer directly by the release’s file naming (the Windows installer is then verified against the sha512 in latest.yml, and the notice has no release notes), and waits until the reset time GitHub gives before asking the API again. If the notice appeared before your platform’s installer had been uploaded to the Release (the packages for each platform are uploaded one after the other), a later check replaces it with one you can download and install directly. A test build looks at the Release feed (releases.atom, which doesn’t count against the API limit either) to find the newest version, so it can find test builds too.

2. Project (stored in the project file)

Current project has four cards.

Basics

Item	Description
Project name, author, description
Mark symbol	The symbol shown in front of entries marked in the Lexicon; empty means *

Languages & fonts

Item	Description
Default language	The current language when the project is opened
Definition languages	Comma-separated language codes such as zh, en. Multilingual text — senses, dimension names, morpheme meanings and so on — is shown and falls back in this order
Languages to write definitions in	Which languages get an input box in multilingual fields such as definitions, translations and names, comma-separated (zh, en). Empty means only the current interface language; languages that already have text are always shown
Font for language data	A project-level font (headwords, IPA, etc.), also used by dictionary exports; empty means the default
Entry image size	Every image is cropped to this pixel size (default 320×240); after changing it, newly imported images use the new size and existing ones are unchanged

Word splitting & gloss

Item	Description
Morpheme boundary symbols	Space-separated, - and = by default; treated as explicit boundaries when the corpus is tokenised. Adding ' makes the apostrophe a boundary too, restoring the vowel dropped in a contraction (t'am = ta + am)
Tokenization	How corpus text is split into words: By whitespace (default) / By character (for writing without spaces, as in Chinese or Japanese) / Custom separator (a JS regular expression; an invalid one falls back to whitespace)
Symbols that count as letters	Symbols listed here are never stripped from the edges of a word as punctuation (the ' of Arabic transliteration, for instance). Apostrophes that start or end a word in the lexicon are picked up automatically, so you rarely need to fill this in

Paradigms

Setting	Description
Complex mode: slots with more dimensions stand on their own	Off by default (simple mode): a slot with more dimensions (polarity.tense.person) that has no setup continues from the one with fewer (polarity.tense). Ticked, each slot stands alone and an empty one produces no form. See Paradigms · Simple and complex mode

3. Exporting as a folder or as one CSV

The Data part has two cards: Export (this section, the read-only copy in section 5 and the study pack in section 8) and Clear data.

Export as folder splits the project into a folder: project.json (metadata and settings), languages.json, lexemes.json, morphemes.json, paradigms.json, sentences.json, phrasebook.json… plus a .txt for each rule set and doc pages as docs/*.md. Good for keeping in git and reading diffs. A folder can also be imported back into a single file.

Export as one CSV puts the whole project into one spreadsheet file: the first line is a format marker, followed by one table after another (each starting with a #table,table name,Chinese name line, followed by a line of column names). Project information, languages and phonemes, orthographies, scripts and glyphs, rule sets, parts of speech and dimensions, morphemes, entries and senses, paradigms, sentences, phrases, abbreviations and docs are all in it. Nested content is split into sub-tables whose @parent column points back to the id of the level above; column-name suffixes indicate types (:opt may be absent, ? may be empty, :num number, :bool true/false, :json complex content), and multilingual text such as names and definitions is split into columns like name.zh and name.en; columns starting with ~ (language names, part-of-speech names) are only there for readability. Content longer than 30,000 characters (embedded fonts, images) is split into chunks in a chunks table at the end, so Excel doesn’t truncate it.

After editing it in a spreadsheet program (changing text and adding rows both work; leave id empty on new rows and it is filled in automatically), pick the .csv in Open project to read it back. What you get is an unsaved project, and saving asks where to save it.

4. Clear data

Clear one module in one go, ready for a fresh import or a fresh start: lexicon, morphemes, corpus, phrasebook, documents, sound-change rule sets, paradigms, parts of speech, grammatical dimensions, inspector modules, abbreviations, scripts (all languages) and entry images. The drop-down shows the current number of items; clicking the red Clear asks for confirmation first, and Ctrl+Z undoes it afterwards.

5. Read-only mode

Export a read-only copy saves an encrypted read-only copy of the project (the whole file is compressed and encrypted; opened in a text editor it is gibberish, and a modified file can’t be opened). When someone opens that file in Qonlang, the top bar shows a Read-only badge, editing controls are hidden and changes are never saved. In addition:

• saving text files, exporting (lexicon / morpheme CSV, dictionaries, corpus and phrase tables, rule sets, docs, folder export, PDF) and copying results are refused, with a toast saying the content can only be viewed in the app;
• in release builds, developer tools can’t be opened while a read-only project is open;
• Save as still works, and saves another encrypted read-only copy.

It is good for sharing your work without worrying that it gets messed up or taken wholesale. The original file is unaffected. Unencrypted read-only copies exported by older versions still open, and can’t be exported either.

6. About

The full Qonlang logo at the top; below it a line with the current version, the latest version on the Release page (known once a background or manual check has asked; until then it says it hasn’t been checked yet) and the licence (MIT); then the data folder path.

Check for updates now checks right away and shows the result next to the button: you have the latest version, a new version is available (the notice at the bottom right also appears, even for a skipped version), or why the check failed — GitHub can’t be reached (check your network or proxy), or GitHub’s request limit is used up for now (try again in a while).

Report a problem opens a new issue on GitHub (you need to be signed in to GitHub) with diagnostics already filled in: the version, system, interface language, data folder, the size of the open project (how many items of each kind, and the file size) and the last few errors. The diagnostics contain no project content, and your home folder in paths is replaced with ~; you can see everything on the GitHub page before submitting, and edit or remove any of it. Please describe what went wrong and how to reproduce it, then submit. Report a problem is also at the top of the Developer panel at the bottom of the start page, and under Help in the menu bar.

Copy diagnostics copies the same diagnostics so you can paste them elsewhere.

7. Connection hints

Closing the blue connection hints at the top of each page is remembered in the application preferences; to show them all again, delete dismissedHints from prefs.json in the data folder (a button will come in a later version).

8. Exporting a study pack (for Qonsona)

Export a study pack on the Export card opens a page of its own that prepares a study pack for Qonsona (formerly Qonlang Study), the companion language-learning app: first decide how each language is taught, then export the project together with those settings as one .qstudy.json file.

These settings are not written into the project file. They are kept per project in study-export/ in the data folder on this computer (in the browser for the web version), and changing them never marks the project as unsaved. On a new computer or after reinstalling, click Load settings from a study pack and pick a study pack you exported earlier; the parts that match the current project are restored.

At the top, fill in the author credit and tick the languages to export (languages that have entries are ticked by default); click Edit on a language to set it up in six tabs below:

Tab	What it does
Cover	Course name (the language name when left empty) and an introduction (Markdown, previewed live), shown on this language’s home page in the study app
Lessons	Each lesson can use a document as its text and list its new words, sentences and phrases (type to search, click a result to add it, click × to remove it); drag the handle on the left to reorder. One lesson per document creates a lesson for each document of this language (and each document not tied to a language), skipping documents that are already in a lesson or hidden
Hidden	Ticked entries, sentences, phrases and documents never appear in the study app — drafts, placeholders, words you would rather keep private. Tick placeholder entries ticks every entry that contains no letters (already ticked the first time the page opens)
Levels	The study app sorts words into 5 levels by frequency; to pin a word to a level, add it here and pick the level
Display	The orthography and script learners see by default, and whether IPA is shown; learners can still switch these themselves
Recordings	Entries, phrases and sentences are listed separately; each row can be recorded with the microphone or given an audio file (webm, ogg, mp3, wav, m4a, flac). Import recordings in bulk takes many files at once: a file matches when its name (without the extension) equals a headword, a phrase or a sentence. The study app plays your recording first and reads the IPA aloud when there is none

Items that are not in any lesson still show up in the study app’s word list and reviews. Entries, sentences and documents deleted from the project are dropped from lessons, hidden items, levels and recordings the next time this page opens.

A study pack is a JSON file: it starts with "format": "qonlang-study-pack", version, the export time and the Qonlang version; study holds the settings above (recordings embedded as data URLs) and project is the complete project, the same as in a project file. Open project in Qonlang does not accept study packs; keep editing the original project file. Study packs cannot be exported from a read-only copy.