Can I Turn Off The Automatic Capitalization?

Everytime I type a period (.) in Scrivener, Scrivener wants to make the next character a capital letter.

I don’t ALWAYS want a capital letter after every period… know why I mean? If this was Scrivener, the “k” in know would have been “K.”

And if I don’t want that next character capitalized, I have to highlight the character(s) and then drill down into the menus to find the “convert to lower case” command.

Please tell me that there is an option in Preferences that turns this “feature” off.

Thanks,

–PS

There is indeed. Go to Preferences/ Corrections/ Auto-Capitalization and uncheck Fix capitalization of sentences.

Hope this helps!

Found it. Thanks.

–P

It’s good you can turn it off in preferences, but I suspect that the main problem is that the OP was incorrectly using an ellipsis. When I tried it in Scrivener I couldn’t get it to auto capitalize if I typed a proper ellipsis…like this. Or even… like this with an extra space.

But if I typed four dots and a space like in the original post… It capitalized the next word.

Just FYI.

An ellipsis is made up of three dots. It has its own typographic character.

On a Mac, in English, type…
ALT SEMICOLON

On an iPad using UK English…
Toggle to the number keypad, then flick the full stop key upwards.

To undo an individual instance of automatic capitalization on a Mac, just hit CMD Z. No need to convert the character through the menu system.

Appendix B of the Scrivener manual (available in Scrivener itself from HELP > SCRIVENER MANUAL) details Preference options.

Also (IIRC) if you have the option to convert three dots into an ellipsis turned OFF… then Scrivener just views them as periods and so it capitalizes the next word if autocapitalization is ON.

I’m having the same problem, but when I go to preferences, automatic capitalization is already unchecked. Problem is still not fixed and this makes writing dialogue really annoying.

Various settings to check and toggle on / off, depending on individual needs…

System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > Correct spelling automatically (and Capitalise words automatically, if needed)

And Scrivener > Preferences > Corrections > Correct spelling errors as you type

And, for each project, Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Check Spelling While Typing

And, optionally, Scrivener > Preferences > Corrections > Fix capitalisation of sentences

Type the next word, let Scrivener capitalize it, and push Undo (⌘z).

Mac OS 10.15.7: With “Fix Capitalization of Sentences Checked,” if I type 3 dots in a row, the first letter of the next word is capitalized. No exceptions. Undo / command - z will undo it, but there are situations where a word is followed by punctuation. It undoes the punctuation and the capital. You can retype the punctuation and proceed. Rather annoying.

If I turn off the option about fixing capitalization, I do not get this effect. I use ellipses as a “pause” in dialog frequently. I use it for missing text in a quote almost never.

If I typed four dots, then a capital would be appropriate as there are 3 dots and then the period for the end of a sentence. And indeed, I see that. However, with three consecutive dots, that is not the behavior I want.

Perhaps complicating this is that there is an option to convert 3 dots to ellipses. Perhaps the behavior is correct then? My historical experience is that turning on auto ellipses and auto dashes makes moving between document formats … difficult. As in the result tends toward random… So, I avoid those features in my source and fix them up in the word format after compile. Maybe my paranoia about ellipses and dashes is no longer valid, but it is based on converting documents (generally for work rather than my writing). The point being, maybe the behavior is correct with an ellipsis and wrong with three dots?

I’m not happy with turning off auto capitalization of sentences, because I want that to auto-correct when I am actually changing sentences.

In any case, I find this current treatment of three dots to be annoying. If nothing else, the fact that an undo of the auto-capitalization followed by a punctuation mark removes the punctuation mark seems like a bug. If there is a space after the word, the space is not deleted, so the behavior is inconsistent.

Thanks for listening to my rant. ;)

Dave

One more related oddity. If I type “… ‘some’” then the “s” is capitalized, and control-z once undoes the capitalization. That is all consistent. However a second control-z, perhaps to remove the final tick mark, removes everything including the original three dots, the tick mark, and the word “some”. It seems like removing the final tick mark would be the expectation.

If you didn’t mean to end the sentence, you should have typed 3 dots (which should become an ellipsis). But you typed four, and the Mac (or Scrivener) correctly understood the significance of that.

If the first three didn’t become an ellipsis (one character, not three), check the option at Edit/Substitutions.

You can turn off capitalizing sentences at Preferences/Corrections in Scrivener or System Preferences/Keyboard/Text or some combination of the two.