Hi. By coincidence, I asked the same question just yesterday, over in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=26252
The directions work perfectly. Thank you so much!
The warnings and cautions are always worth noting when messing with ini and other system files. Fortunately in this case, the risks are relatively low.
The easiest and fastest way to prepare the Word custom.dic for copying into Scrivener’s wordlist.ini is to – believe it or not – open it directly (or otherwise get it into) Word itself. (Word doesn’t object to your opening this file, even when Word is running, though making a copy first is never a bad idea.)
Inside Word, you’ll find an alphabetical list of words, one word per line/paragraph.
Then you can do a simple search and replace, where you:
– Search for ^p (that’s a carrot symbol followed immediately by a lowercase p) which is the search code for paragraphs,
– Replace that with a comma followed directly by a space.
Click Replace All, and the list will instantly be turned into a long, wrapped, single “line” (actually a single paragraph) with the words still in alphabetical order.
Then delete the comma and space after the very last word in this long line.
At this point, as described by SpringfieldMH, you can copy this directly into wordlist.ini, which can be opened in any plain text editor like Notepad or Notepad++. (The text copied from Word is “clean” and can be copied into the text editor without any problem. I suspect – though I haven’t tried this – that you could even open the wordlist.ini file directly in Word, paste in the new words, and as long as you save that file in its original text format – using the same .ini extension, and you don’t violate the “comma-space” after each word - – it would work just fine.)
It’s best to save wordlist.ini when Scrivener isn’t running, though here too it doesn’t seem to mind if that file is played with while running. But you WILL need to exit Scrivener and then run it again so that it can read in the new wordlist.ini file.
Strangely, when you add additional words to wordlist.ini using one of the standard in-program methods, then reopen the file, Scrivener will have re-sorted the list of words in a way that appears random. This concerned me at first, but everything seems to be working fine.