I need to be able to write some lines or even paragraphs in French within what is essentially an English language project. I have downloaded the French dictionaries but I cannot find how to label a particular paragraph as being in a different language.
This is a facilty available in most word processors and I assumed I would find it in Scrivener. But from what I have been able to find, I think the language for spell checking in Scrivener can only be set by project. Is this correct?
Yes, I’m afraid you’re correct. That is one of the reasons I have “check spelling” turned off in Scrivener and do it post-Compile in Nisus Writer Pro where you can mark stretches as being in specific languages linked to appropriate dictionaries.
Mark
I have the same issue and have to do the final polish in Ms Word. But Scrivener’s benefits are still massively more important to me than these minor drawbacks. Still, something I hope will be part of a future update (although I’m sure that the devs couldn’t possibly think about anything beyond shipping 3.0 at the moment).
Thanks for the confirmation, both of you.
I really appreciate Scrivener for its binder, the ability to restructure easily and to have research documentation easily to hand. I write non-fiction stuff and depend heavily on styles not only for appearance. Layout plays an important part for the conveyance of information especially for lists and nested lists which I find impossible to do satisfactorily in Scrivener.
When I get the structure finalised and first draft pretty well completed I export to LibreOffice Writer and do all the page layout, contents, index etc there. I find Writer’s application of styles to be easier to set up and use than Word’s.
I readily understand that now is not the moment to go for further development with the devs being on the verge of releasing V3 for production. I imagine it must be really close now considering the raised frequency of RC releases.
As a workaround, you could use a variant of the system I developed using Scriv 2 for Mac in order to be able to apply styles easily in my word processor.
For each language, create a style—character or paragraph, depending on which suits your use-case better—which differs by colour. Then, with the compiled document in LibreOffice/Word, search for text in that colour, mark it with its language attribute and remove the colour . I assume that can be done in both of those … I use Nisus Writer Pro, Mac only, in which it’s easy to do.
The colour differences need not be discernible to the eye, if you think it would be distracting. Black being #FFFFFF, I used #FFFFFE #FFFEFF, #FEFFFF and so on, invisible to the eye but clear to the computer. On the other hand, you could equally say that it would be useful in Scriv to see at a glance that you had a “language style” set. Note: my main other language is Chinese, so I didn’t use the system for that; I used it for headings, block quotes etc. so discernibility in Scriv came from font size, etc.
HTH
Mark