As a journalist who uses Dragon Dictate for transcription, I find Scrivener wonderfully helpful. That said, Dictate works better on Full Text Control apps. I’m hoping (and wondering if) Scrivener will one day be a FTC app. Thanks.
Scrivener uses the core Mac text editing engine, which is common to just about all Mac software (at least those that haven’t gone out of their way to write their own text editor from scratch, like Word). So really this should be up to the makers of this software. I had thought they supported native Mac software already, though. Have you asked them about it?
If you Google around you will learn that the company that develops Dragon Dictate isn’t the most responsive. Dragon works best with their proprietary Notepad and TextEdit and what they’ve recommended in the past is applications that allow Full Text Control. I use with successfully with Scrivener but on occasion it gets wonky. FTC really simplifies making text corrections.
That’s interesting, that it works in TextEdit but not Scrivener, given that both use the Mac text engine I was referring to. I seem to recall we looked into this a few years ago and there was no way to change anything from our end. I’d like to add some notes to look into this, but I’m finding very little information on “full text control”. If you do a focussed search, such as ’ “full text control” site:apple.com ’ (where even developer information and documentation is indexed), you’ll find nothing relevant. Did you read anything more specific somewhere that you could point me to?
I, too work with Scrivener and DragonDictate. Full Text Control would be GREAT GREATGREATGREATGREAT
Yes, but as Ioa has asked, what you s “full text control” in terms of implementation? I have no idea what that means. Scrivener uses the same text engine as TextEdit so should work the same with Dragon Dictate.
I’m clueless about Full Text Control, but I can give you a couple of ramifications of not having it.
• Using Dictate, if you are 2,000 words into a document, for example, and ask the program to search for a particular word in order to make a correction, it will proceed word-by-word backward through the document trying to find that word. In TextEdit or the Dictate notepad, it immediately goes to the word without methodically searching. Do that enough times and the time saving with dictation begins to evaporate.
• Occasionally in programs that don’t have the mysterious FTC the cursor can start to act up, taking over the document, working its way backward and highlighting text as it goes. At some arbitrary point it stops and makes an edit you didn’t intend. There’s no way to stop it and the only way to revoke the changes it makes is with control-Z. The folks who make Dragon have said to just use their notepad to eliminate that from happening.
• Formatting commands work fine in TextEdit and the notepad, but can be wonky in Scrivener.
A little background. I do all my writing in Scrivener using side-by-side panels. First I transcribe interviews, putting the sound in one panel and the transcription I am working on in the other. I put on a headset, listen to the interview playing in one panel and dictate what I am hearing into the other. I can start and stop the recording as needed via the hotkeys. Parroting is a bit annoying, but it is a lot faster than typing and the ability to stop and start the recording without having to leave Scrivener makes it perfect for this use. TextEdit and the notepad require mousing back-and-forth to Quicktime or Scrivener to start-and-stop the recording. As wonky as it can be using Dragon Dictate with Scrivener, it by far beats the alternative for my use. And if it worked the way TextEdit does, it would be absolutely perfect!
Well that’s too bad, I’m sorry to hear the two don’t play better. It sure would be nice if they did, but like we’re saying, it doesn’t seem to be a programming thing we’re talking about here. Technical searches turn up nothing on the phrase, but general searches turn up a lot of press releases and feature grids put out by Nuance.
It’s more like their way of saying they went the extra mile to make sure Microsoft Word and TextEdit works with our dictation software—and can you blame them? 
Don’t they have some new kind of thing now where you can speak into a window and it dumps the results into the window behind it? I saw something about that in the press releases I stumbled across.