Linguistic focus

What decides in what languages the linguistic focus function works – Scrivener or MacOS? Noticed that it doesn’t work in Swedish, but apparently in German and French (even if French text within French quotation marks – « … » – is not identified as direct speech).

It’s determined by the double and single quotes set in System Preferences under Keyboard > Text. Anything between the quotes set there will be focussed (and it should work for French and any other language as long as the language uses the quotes set there).

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Thanks Keith. That makes sense. I just copied a French text, guillemet and all, for testing purposes. That linguistic focus works full out in German, I noticed because I had a long quote in German within a Swedish text. Only the German text was affected. In a purely Swedish text, texts within quotation marks are focussed, but not verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. I guess that this is decided by the operating system and beyond your command. Am I right?

The dialogue focus is purely my code. It was originally built on the assumptions of English dialogue, which works for many languages, and then updated to allow for French, too, which uses em-dashes at the start of the line. Next I need to update it to allow for Spanish, which formats things differently again. So I have to manage all of that. However, everything else - nouns, verbs and the rest - is a macOS thing. Apple introduced the ability to run a search for all nouns, or all adverbs and so on. It’s not 100% even in English, but it’s still useful as a rough tool.

All the best,
Keith

Great function, but I think I want to omit the single quotes because it sees quotes in example -'t - as a start of a dialog. Is there a way to omit those single quotes? (note: in Dutch language the single quote is used at the beginning of a word. Example: 't or 'm or city names like 's-Hertogenbosch.

Hello, sorry to disturb you. I asked Ruth several time last year when there will be an update that is very important for french writers concerning the dialog focus. For french writers, the dialog marker is not “” but – for the begining of the dialog. The end of the dialog is marked by a line break.

We have no news if this need for french writers is taking in consideration or not ? The only answer we get is always : “I am not a part of the development team, so I do not have any information their timelines for when updates or patches might be available.”

Can we please have some answer ? Thanks a lot