I use a lot of scientific names (Latin plant names) in my documents, but seldom use them more than once. So, I don’t want to have thousands of custom spelling check entries for obscure Linnaean binomials that I will never use again (nor for certain proper names that I will only use once). In Word, I can format a word of phrase “Do not check spelling or grammar”, so I’ve written a little macro to assign this, plus italic formatting, to a keyboard shortcut; one press and my scientific name is formatted properly and will not be flagged as mis-spelt no matter how many times I re-open the document.
There doesn’t appear to be any way to get this functionality in Scrivener (Windows), as far as I can see. If I’m wrong, please tell me; if not, please could I request a “do not check spelling or grammar” function in a future release?
If you right-click the word, you can choose “Ignore Spelling”. Currently this creates an ignore list which applies to all projects, and choosing Spelling > Recheck Spelling from the context menu will cause the word to be flagged again in all projects. We have it on the list to make this work on a per-project basis in the future, but it requires an overhaul to the way the spellcheck works in the program, so it will be part of more major changes.
Thanks for the reply, but unfortunately the “ignore spelling” command only works until you close Scrivener; once you re-start, all the words are underlined in red as miss-spelt again. When you do the major overhaul, please could you add an option to “ignore forever”? (I don’t mind whether it’s across projects or per project, but the latter would probably be ideal.)
I also do a good deal of writing that uses obscure technical terms, and I often don’t feel the need to add them to the permanent acceptable-words database. And yet, I wonder if that isn’t (for me, at least) a relic of the days when disk space was precious and CPUs were slow. With today’s vast hard drives (not to mention cloud drives) and fast computers, is there really any significant cost to letting the spelling list balloon? Who knows if maybe one day you’ll need to refer to Lomatia tasmanica or I’ll need to mention Kalba Savua again, and there it will be, free of error marking? And, of course, if I mistype it “Kabla Savau,” as I’m likely to do, that will be flagged so I can fix it. Just a thought.
It’s not the disk space I worry about, but the likelihood of inserting a word that’s too close to a common misspelling. For example, I need to use the old Latin phrase “materia medica” in the current book, but most of the time I’m more likely to be mis-typing either “medical” or “material” and I want the spelling-check to notice that I’ve left the last letter off.