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.