After installing Version 2.9.0.8 Beta (273516) 64-bit - 01 ago 2018 and running it in Portuguese, I’ve downloaded the two available Portuguese dictionaries: “Portuguese (Brazil-pt)” and “Portuguese (Brazil-pt-br)”. Well, “Portuguese (Brasil-pt)” should read “Portuguese (Portugal-pt)” since it’s the European version. “Portuguese (Brazil-pt-br)” seams to be titled OK.
Big issue: both dictionaries available through Scrivener are outdated, museum-worthy antiquities. I’m afraid none of them follows modern Portuguese spelling, Please visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugues … nt_of_1990
Besides that fact, for those writers who still want to use those vintage spellings, the dictionaries lack absolutely any quality. In every 200 words, they return about 15 false positives… Those two dictionaries have no use at all.
Since I bought Scrivener 1, I’ve been using MSWord to process my text and I then paste it back to Scrivener so that I can rearrange the chapters order. But let’s face it, that is insane.
I’m certainly not going to pay for Scrivener 3 until this issue is solved,
I’m not sure if I should treat this as a bug or as new feature request. It’s like if the English dictionary was set to allow “My ealdest brodor’s hus” instead of “My eldest brother’s house”.
It’s a wider issue than just Portuguese. The default English dictionary in use is of limited utility to me; I consistently use words it doesn’t know. I’d like to install a larger dictionary.
And, you would think you could simply install new dictionaries – there are plenty of dictionaries on the web, including one for English Large. For hunspell.
Scriv won’t recognize it. I can copy it into a directory where it’s supposed to be, but Scriv refuses to recognize that it’s there. Not sure why.
Renamed it (after first backing up the originals; I’m daring, not stupid) the exact same as the existing dictionary files, in the same directory.
EDIT from original.
I forced Scriv to use new dic files. The spellings are evidently hard-coded into the program. That’s a little short-sighted, but the programmer no doubt had a reason (ease of programming, perhaps).
So. You want a different Portuguese dictionary, find one and replace the one that’s installed. I think Scrivener is using hunspell’s, but which version I could not tell you. The format of the dictionaries is a bit odd, and editing them can be difficult. Hunspell’s, Aspell’s, and Myspell’s dictionaries are essentially similar.
The dictionaries are located at
C:\Program Files\Scrivener3\hunspell\dict
My English ones are at C:\Program Files\Scrivener3\hunspell\dict\English-en-us
I created a new directory under C:\Program Files\Scrivener3\hunspell\dict for my old files (English-us-en-old), copied everything out of the English-en-US directory into that new one (that’s your backup). Scriv won’t see the new one unless it’s spelled precisely the same as one it expects to see.
Copy dictionary files into it. In my case, they were named English-en-us.aff and English-en-us.dic. However your old files were named, the new ones need to be named that way. There’s a readme file there, too, required by the license I’m sure; leave it in place.
Restart Scrivener and see if it recognizes the new dictionary. It should. Then you’ll need to see if it works with it.
Thank you both for the detailed reports. I’m sorry to hear of the problems with the Portuguese dictionaries–I know that was a problem with the Aspell ones, which were no longer being maintained, but I had been under the impression that with Hunspell and the more recent dictionaries there, this would be resolved. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. May I ask if there’s a Hunspell Portuguese dictionary you do know to be good? That might help us replace the current one with something better.
As far as the naming of the two dictionary files, I believe this was just taken verbatim from the source, but given that neither is useful anyway, this should be corrected simply by replacing them with better dictionaries once we’re able to do so.
The ability to download and install custom dictionaries would be possibly the best way to resolve dictionary woes longterm, and it is something we’ll look into. As rwfranz supposed, the limitation now is technical, but I hope it can be worked around to allow expanding the dictionaries more easily. (I say this not as a programmer, bear in mind!) Meanwhile, thank you for providing the tip on replacing the default dictionaries with your own. Note that a new installation may replace these, so you may need to keep your custom dictionary handy to put back in place in that event.
Hi, I’m a windows user and I always found the portguese dicionary bad… As you asked for a better dicionary i send you a link of a more recent version of the dicionary and hope it helps:
I’ve tried do copy this dicionary for the folder of Scrivener 3, but when I opened Scrivener it didn’t recognize the portuguese any more, so I had to install the older version of the dicionary again!
As I’m using the beta version of Windows 3 I noticed that some menus are in portuguese, but many other options of the menus are in english… so if you need a help about the portuguese language, tell me…
Hi Aristoteles - Thanks for the suggestion. Have you tried following rwfranz’s instructions for renaming the dictionary files when placing it in the Scrivener directory? At the moment it’s not possible to just add new dictionaries, but you may be able to “trick” Scrivener into using this Portuguese dictionary instead of the default one by just swapping it out and changing the name of your preferred dictionary to match the one already in Scrivener’s hunspell\dict\Portuguese-pt folder.
Thanks also for the offer of translating the UI. We have had volunteers for translating Scrivener into both European and Brazilian Portuguese, but this isn’t all in place yet (and with the beta still in development, menu names are changing and being added, so even when we do have translation files in, they may not have the most recent additions). That said, I’d be happy to add your name and email to our list in case we can use the extra help. Could you drop me an email at win3beta@literatureandlatte.com with your name, best email to contact you, and whether you wanted to help with the European or Brazilian Portuguese translation? Thanks!
Hello, this time replace the dictionary with a new one worked well … I must have done something wrong the first time (I think in the file name I used “_” instead of “-” … Thank you …
I have already sent you a personal email in case you need help with the translation.
All the best
Thanks a lot, all of you. Finally a not-so-perfect yet decent-enough modern Portuguese dictionary I can work with. I’ve just installed it and it’s doing the trick. Thanks.