Dictionary/language problem?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I’m new to Scrivener, so I don’t know if this problem is my own doing or something screwy going on.

I’ve created several Scrivener projects and everything worked fine. Today, I created a new project and, when I typed quotation marks, Scrivener automatically formatted them according to German, i.e. the opening quotation marks are on the baseline, with the closing marks raised. This hasn’t happened to me before, either in Scrivener or in any other program.

The OS X spelling settings were set to ‘Automatic by language’ and I was typing English text. I changed the language from the Spelling and Grammar settings to British English. Although no words are underlined in red, indicating that spellchecker is working in English, quotation marks still appear in the German format!

If I type quotation marks in this editor, like “this”, they appear correctly. They are also correctly formatted in Mail, Word and Pages.

In System Preferences, under Language and Text, English is set as the top language with German second.

The only other things that changed are:

  1. I just bought and registered the full version.
  2. I upgraded Scrivener to v2.02 today. Is this a bug? Can anyone suggest a solution?

Thanks,

Steve

2

On Snow Leopard, Scrivener uses the smart quotes as defined in the System Preferences under “Language and Text” > “Text”. On earlier systems, the quotes type is set via the “Auto-Correction” pane in Scrivener’s own preferences. The only reason you’d get German quotes is if you have somehow changed one of these settings…
All the best,
Keith

3

Thanks for the quick reply. This did, indeed, rectify my problem. What I now can’t understand is how those settings in System Preferences got changed! Nor can I understand why those settings don’t have an influence in Mail or Pages. But that’s not your problem! Thanks again.

4

Mail and Pages probably overwrite it with their own text settings…but I’m just making stuff up, I don’t use either of those programs…For future reference, should you run into a weird text problem like this, it’s good to compare with TextEdit (rather than Word, Page, etc.) because it uses the basic Apple text system, so sometimes things are either a) Apple bugs or b) system settings and will be reflected there as well, letting you know it’s not Scrivener-specific.

Wow, if that’s as incomprehensible as I think it is, I’m sorry. I’m going to stop talking now and go sleep off NaNoWriMo. :neutral_face: