Linguistic Focus → Direct Speech and dialogue written with dashes (Polish style)

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
, ,
1

Hello everyone,

my name is Petel. I’m a novelist writing primarily in Polish and the original author of the text discussed below. I’m new to the forum and hope I’m posting this in the right place.

I have a question regarding Linguistic Focus → Direct Speech in Scrivener for macOS and how it handles non-English dialogue conventions.

The issue

Linguistic Focus → Direct Speech works as expected when dialogue is written in quotation marks, for example:

“Hello,” he said.

However, in Polish (and in several other European languages), standard literary dialogue is written using dashes, e.g.:

– Cześć.
– Cześć, szefie.

In this case, Linguistic Focus → Direct Speech reports 0 instances and fades the entire document, as if no direct speech were present.

What I’ve checked

  • Preferences → Corrections (Auto-Correction, Punctuation)

  • Preferences → Editing

  • Difference between Focus Mode and Linguistic Focus (confirmed they are separate features)

  • Document is plain text (not script mode, not PDF)

  • Issue is reproducible across multiple documents and projects

I couldn’t find any setting in the manual that allows Linguistic Focus to treat dash-initiated lines as direct speech.

My questions

  1. Is this a known limitation of Linguistic Focus?

  2. Is there any advanced or hidden preference that enables Direct Speech detection for dialogue written with dashes?

  3. Has anyone found a practical workaround other than temporarily converting dashes to quotation marks?

  4. Are there any plans to improve Direct Speech detection for non-English dialogue conventions?

Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time and for Scrivener — it’s an excellent tool for long-form writing.

Best regards,
Petel

2

Maybe try:

“If you make use of a marking system that denotes dialogue with an em-dash at the beginning of the paragraph, you will need to enable Linguistic focus uses Spanish-style dialogue, in the General: Language settings pane”

(Manual: 20.3.2 Linguistic Focus, p.517)

Not sure how well or at all that works for non-em-dashes (in case you use other dashes), though.

spanish
spanish1310×986 81.8 KB

3 Likes
3

Yes, while the Spanish-style checkbox does a lot more than just dash prefix detection, none of the rest of it should get in the way of that. It does require em-dashes, but will detect both with and without a space following the dash, which covers most uses I’m aware of.

3 Likes
4

Thx :slight_smile: , this is helpful, my friend.

1 Like
5

It’s nice of you to confirm this. Thank you.

1 Like