Auto-correct driving me nuts - how to fix?

[writergal]

Hello! I am running Scrivener 3.3.6

In my MS I have a word which refers to a place: Otherworld.

For some reason, Scrivener always Auto-corrects this to Otherworldly. I have no idea why. I would never have used that word, with that capital “O”, so I don’t know why it decided that Otherworldly, referring to a place, is the word I want. For the life of me I cannot figure out how to make this auto-correct stop. For now I have to just delete the. “ly” every time I type the word, which is really annoying. Every time I get annoyed enough to try to figure out how to make this stop, it never works:

• use Project Replace - seems like an “after the fact” solution, to replace all the misspelled words to the one that is correct. Why can’t I just type it as Otherworld and not have the “ly” added automatically in the first place?
• right-clicking on the word to “learn-spelling” doesn’t work, because it corrects it automatically before I can even do that. When I click on the word after I have deleted the “ly”, there is no “learn spelling” option to go to. I can get a menu that bring up “spelling and grammar”. Clicking on “spelling and grammar” opens the “change” box, which I am not sure how that is relevant in this case because I have already changed it to the word I want.

How can you access the “dictionary” for a specific project? Or even for all the projects, if Scrivener doesn’t create specific lexicons for each project? I just want to find “Otherworldly” and delete it as a word, so that Scrivener won’t automatically change Otherworld to Otherworldly every time I type it.

[RuthS]

Hi writergal. Scrivener gets these tools from the macOS.

I’m wondering if the behavior you’re seeing is more from Apple’s predictive text than from its spell-check tools. Which macOS version are you using?

If its macOS 14 Sonoma or MacOS 15 Sequoia, you might see if going to Scrivener > Settings > Corrections and ticking the “Only suggest completions from custom auto-complete lists” box corrects the issue.

That will stop Scrivener from relying on the predictive text tools in your macOS and may correct the issue.

[Dain]

This is a bit of a kludge, but if you are willing to commit to never using “Otherworldly” then you can always set a custom transform in the project settings to replace the auto-incorrect word with your intention as Scrivener compiles, thus bypassing the otters.

(Otter correct…. Inside joke)

[writergal]

Hi @RuthS

Thanks for that! I looked in the Scrivener Settings > Corrections. That box is already ticked. So unfortunately that won’t help.

I am running Sonoma on my MacBook Air, which is where I use Scrivener.

[writergal]

Hi @Dain

Thanks for this suggestion! I looked under Project Settings, but I don’t see where/how to do this. I don’t see a “custom transform” option anywhere. Do I put that in under Custom Metadata somehow?

I would definitely commit to never using “Otherworldlly” with a capital “C”, but perhaps I might need to use it as an adjective (although maybe not, since it could be confusing in the context of the story). As it so happens, I get the completion of “otherworld” to “otherworldly” no matter if I use a capital or not.

I have been playing around with typing Otherworld, Otherworldly, otherworld, otherworldly. I always get the automatic addition of “ly” to O/otherworld. However, I have noticed that if I don’t delete the annoying “ly” right away, it disappears after a second to make the word “O/otherworld”. I haven’t noticed that before. Weird. I suppose I can live with that if I can resist the urge to delete the “ly” ending right away. But I wish I could figure out how to stop it from being added in the first place.

[RuthS]

Are you able to capture a screenshot of what you’re seeing before the “-ly” disappears?

That really does sound a lot like the predictive text tools, so I’m concerned that the Scrivener setting isn’t behaving correctly.

As for Dain’s suggestion, I believe the settings Dain meant are these:

[Dain]

I don’t see where/how to do this.

It’s baked into the compile popup.

Click the far right icon on the top of the right side of the window to expose it, and click on the + sign at the bottom of the pane to add a new one.

[writergal]

I have attached a screenshot. The first two words, which both appear as Otherworld, I had typed Otherworld and otherworld. They both corrected to Otherworld with a captial O and no “ly”. Not sure why!! I thought maybe the problem was fixed, but…

Third word, Otherworld, auto-corrrected to Otherworldly.

Fourth word, I typed otherworld, and it corrected to Otherworldlly.

Fifth word, I captured before it auto-corrected (which I discovered happens once I hit space or return). You can see I typed otherworld, no capital. It has the “ly” in light font. As soon as I hit “space” to go to the next word, it will correct to Otherwordly, as in the word directly above it.

So I don’t know what’s going on. I just want to be able to type Otherworld as the name of a place, and have it STAY that way, without the extra “ly” automatically added so I don’t have to go back and change it. So annoying.

Thanks for the screen shot of the project settings. I did see that, but again, I’m stumped as to how to fill this out. Under “word”, I would put Otherworld? Or Otherworldly? If this is an “auto-correct” feature, shouldn’t there be a place where I can put the equivelant of, “if THIS WORD shows up, please auto-correct to THAT WORD”. There’s no guidance here as to what to do, except for the note at the bottom, which I also don’t understand. What does “script mode” mean - is it asking if I am writing a literal “script”? And “general mode” would not be a script?

Sigh. I generally love Scrivener but these types of things truly baffle me. I don’t know why we can’t just go into a dictionary associated with a project, or for ALL the projects, and delete or add a word easily.

Lisa

[auxbuss]

Just a suggestion: try adding Otherworld to your personal dictionary, which can be found in ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary. It’s just a list of words, and you can edit it in, say, TextEdit, for example.

My reasoning is that if the word is in there, then autocorrect shouldn’t touch it. I’ve not idea whether this is true or not.

[xiamenese]

My ½p of question and suggestion:

1. A question: @RuthS suggests ticking the box “Only suggest completions from custom auto-complete lists”; do you want completions to be on generally? I have it turned off as I find that and automatic spelling correction a right pain.
2. A suggestion: If you do want auto-completion turned on generally, what about setting up a text replacement in System Settings → Keyboard → Replacements and give yourself a shortcut say otw to be relaced by Otherworld? Then if you type otw and press Space it will immediately be replaced by Otherworld with a following space, so shouldn’t invoke auto-completion at that point. N.B. I haven’t tried it for the latter as I don’t have auto-completion turned on.
   
   Mark

[writergal]

Thank you to all who responded to this. I “think” I may have fixed it now. I think that this was a MacOS feature - the auto-complete. So I took @xiamenese 's suggestion and turned off completions. Viola! No more unwanted Otherworldly! Appreciate you all who gave me tips on this, it was very helpful!