In Scrivener, at least on a Mac, the word after “i.e.” will automatically be capitalized, which is very much annoying.
To reproduce, write out “This bug—i.e. the one that capitalizes words after “i.e.”—bugs me.” The “the” will be changed to “The”, despite appearing midway through the sentence.
I wish this were not the case.
This does not happen in other apps—i.e. Notes—so I don’t think it is operating specific.
Oh boy… one of life’s small jokes. 
Maybe, but I still think that is a bug because it is “fixing” capitalization that is not at the start of a sentence.
Determining whether a period is the end of a sentence or is being used for some other reason requires that the program have some understanding of grammar. It’s not a trivial programming task.
(Used to be that you could tell because a sentence-ending period would be followed by two spaces, rather than one, but that convention has lapsed.)
Katherine
Every time a dot does not mean the end of a sentence and a new capital letter, cmd + Z is your only friend :
“i.e.” + “the” + space = “i.e. The”
then cmd+Z → “i.e. the”
Same issue in French dialogue (followed by a ‘he says’) :
— Je m’en vais… dit-il.
— Je m’en vais ? dit-il.
— Je m’en vais ! dit-il.
Is there a reason why this hasn’t been fixed yet? It seems like a fairly elementary point on what must be an extremely common issue, no?
It’s probably because the autocorrect rountines are baked into the development tools for Mac developers, but the source code is not accessible for Keith to fix. If he could have fixed it, he would have. Trust me, Keith doesn’t leave these kinds of bugs lying around for years if they can be worked around.
Meanwhile, if you want to save a few keystrokes for typing these sorts of common abbreviations and solve this issue for yourself, try a trick I found from the following website: best-mac-tips.com/2015/02/07/pre … scrivener/
In short, create a system-wide substitution for “ie” that turns it into “i.e.” for you. Because you won’t be typing in the periods, no automatic capitalization will occur afterwards.
This actually has been fixed in 3.0.
Has this really been fixed in Scrivener 3.0 ? For German it still hasn’t been , so when I type “z.B.” (meaning e.g.) anything that comes afterwards will be capitalized . It also seems trivial to me to prevent that, since any note taking program or word processing programs (e.g. MS Word) don’t do it and otherwise possess about the same spellchecking /grammar checking power as Scrivener. Will there be an update to fix this ?
The latest version of Scrivener is 3.1.3. Do you still see the problem there? Do you see it in TextEdit?
Katherine
I’m not the previous poster, but I, too, still see this happening (Scrivener 3.1.3, MacOS 10.14.6). The system language is German, but Scrivener’s is English, if that matters.
It does not happen in TextEdit. It doesn’t happen in Scrivener’s “Notes” panel as I just noticed. It does happen in my manuscript’s text files, though.
Also in some languages the 3 dots are used to create suspense like in: “and suddenly … she disappeared!” and Scrivener capitalizez the verb there. Can I let autocapitalization on but disable the capitalization after the 3 dots?
It’s also still happening in 3.1.3 in my version, writing in German, running Scrivener in German (and it doesn’t happen in TextEdit). Say I write “z.B.” (the German equivalent of e.g.) in a sentence, then Scrivener will capitalize whatever comes after that and I need to manually correct it each time…
Hi, is there a follow up on this problem ? It is really tedious and annoying to have to correct capitalization after EACH single abbreviation that’s used in-sentence. Would much appreciate if this could be fixed in an update soon
Hi Katherine , any news on this issue ? It’s still not fixed for German, although it can’t be linked to the Apple system preferences, as it doesn’t happen in any other word processor, text editor, etc. Would be grateful to hear back from you about it. I use Scrivener 3.2.1.
Is there going to be a fix to this or do you have any advice on other ways to get rid of it? As it stands I have to manually correct every single word after an abbreviation since it will always be mis-capitalized. So would much appreciate any suggestions how this issue can be dealt with in a more systematic matter (like substitutions maybe?!)
The code that does the capitalisation is Apple’s code, so there’s no way KB can fix it. Either do a Cmd-Z immediately after typing the word following ‘i.e.’, or, if it impacted me seriously, I’d type the ‘i.e.’, ‘e.g.’ and any similar abbreviations without the full stop(s) and use a replacement at compile time.
Mark
You can disable autocapitalization in the Scrivener → Preferences → Corrections pane.
Katherine
Thanks a lot! Of course this gets rid of autocapitalization altogether (not only after abbreviations) but it’s a work-around so thanks