Brazilian Portuguese Dictionary need updating

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

Hello!

I’m a big fan of Scrivener and use it every day. That said, I would like to know if there are any plans to update the Brazilian Portuguese built-in dictionary (used by the spell checker).

We had a spelling reform back in 2008, but the dictionary still have the old versions for a lot of words. Examples:

  • The word “ideia” (idea in portuguese) does not have an accent anymore (it was written as “idéia”, with an acute accent in the “e”, before the reform)
    -The word “voo” (flight in portuguese) is the same: it was written as “vôo” before)

  • Lots of composed words lost the hyphen (for example, auto-escola turned into autoescola - “driving school” in portuguese

  • Several other words lost their accents, hyphens, and had other changes

    And I’m talking specifically about Brazilian Portuguese, but in fact the reform changed all Portuguese versions.

    I know I can add the new word spellings (voo, ideia, etc) to the dictionary, but as sometimes I still spell them the old way (habits die hard) it’s imperative for me to be able to delete the old spelling from the dictionary too, so Scrivener will point it out for me if I use them.

    I couldn’t find a way inside the software to delethe built-in words though, and after looking around in the forums it looks like Scrivener uses a third-party spell-checker and has no way of editing its database directly. The format of this database isn’t trivial as well, so I’m unable to remove the words manually.

In short:

  • Ideal solution: an update on the dictionary used by Scrivener, so it will abide by the new spelling in the Portuguese language.

  • Work-around: a way to edit the database, so I could take the old words out by miself (less than ideal, but better than nothing).

    Thanks, Andre

2

Although it refers to the beta version, this thread has some tips for installing a better dictionary, including a link to one.

3

Hello and thank you for your answer!

The dictionary mentioned in that post is for the Portugal’s portuguese, very different from the brazilian one. It would be even worse )for a brazilian, of course) than the built-in dictionary of Scrivener, unfortunately.

Is there a way to edit the dict file from Scrivener?

Thanks, Andre

4

Ah, quite so! I didn’t notice that was the case. It would be about as useless to you as the isolationist Galician dictionary, I’m sure! There is not an editor for these files in Scrivener, they are not made by us, but are rather part of a global community effort. The best thing to do would be to search for Hunspell dictionaries, and maybe looking with LibreOffice or OpenOffice in your search terms, as that will be the same engine we use.