It would be nice to have the option to add misspelled words to autocorrect during spell check.
“Learn Spelling” should be an option both when right-clicking and underlined “misspelled” word or when using the Spell Check dialogue. Once it’s learned, it will be used for auto-correct. You can also add words directly to your personal word list via the Auto-Correction tab in Tools > Options… (you can remove or edit them here as well).
I may be wrong here, but when they talk of adding words to auto-correct during spell-checking, I think they might be talking of what Scrivener calls “substitutions”.
Say you have a word like “café”, and neither it, nor the unaccented “cafe” is in your dictionary. In Scrivener, you can add “café” to the dictionary, but it will only “auto-correct” if you have it set to auto-correct spelling as you type. This isn’t necessarily desirable, as Scrivener can auto-correct all sorts of things you don’t want changed.
Alternatively, you could add it as a substitution so every time you write “cafe” Scrivener changes it to “café”. However, you have to do this manually, by clicking down through several menus.
In Word, for example, you can right click on a word underlined as a spelling error, select “auto-correct” and pick from a number of spelling suggestions. This will add the words to the equivalent of Word’s “substitution” list (it’s called “Replace text as you type”).
It would basically mean, when you right clicked on a spelling error, as well as getting the list of spelling suggestions at the top and the options like “ignore spelling” and “learn spelling” there would be another “substitute…” which when selected would open a secondary menu (just as “spelling”, “highlight”, “text colour”, “font” and several other options do) listing the same spelling suggestions. Once one of them was selected, it would automatically add the “wrong” word in the left column of the substitution table, and the “correct” word in the right hand column so that every time you type the incorrect word it changes automatically.
It would be really, really handy to have a feature like this in Scrivener.
That’s right. Most other word processors have a means to both correct the misspelled word, and to add the misspelling to auto correct (or substitutions) at the same time. So, if I type “siad” instead of “said,” I can tell it to automatically change it to the “said” as I type. Adding it to “learn spelling” does not do that.
The correct spelling as you type feature, which does turn “siad” into “said,” for example, also turns “actoin” into “acton,” rather than the correct “action.” It turned “substitutoin” into “substituting.” One of the common errors that auto-correct fixes is typing of the “ion” ending as “oin.” For these reasons, the correct spelling as you type feature introduces as many errors as it fixes. I used it for a while, and it made a mess of the document.
We need to be able to add words to “substitutions” via the spell checker.
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