I love Scrivener. Always have Always will. I am nearing completion of a 90,000 word novel which I know I could not have written in Word.
However Scrivener has ONE bug that drives me crazy
Scrivener has THE worst spell checker on the planet
if I write ātoā but mistype it as āotā it gives me āOTā though I have repeatedly tried to make the auto correction be ātoā
same thing with "house
I mistype āhosueā Scrivener auto corrects it to āHouseā not āhouseā
I want to write āmanagedā but mistakenly write āmangedā it does not give me an error, even though Iāve put that in my auto correction list.
It also never shows me if Iāve written the same word twice (such as āthe theā or āand andā)
I always go to Word for my final clean up, but how about the folks who want to go directly to eBook?
Unless one is a brilliant copy editor, those mistakes will not be so easily caught in a large manuscript.
I too would love for the Scrivener folks to ditch the asinine spellcheck/autocorrect currently used and offer something sensible. The spellcheck is so bad that Iāve simply turned it off. I got tired of typos being automatically turned into the least-likely option without being offered a choice or to simply be capitalized. If I type āhanā, there are a number of words I could mean, but āHanā is not high on the list of possibilities. Yet thatās what I get, whether I like it or not.
Also, Scrivener is the only word processor Iāve ever used that canāt be set up to use autocorrect as shortcuts to character names, because the autocorrect does not recognize that if I want ājā to autocorrect to āJackā I mean a ājā in isolation, not every ājā used. Iāve seen suggestions to surround the letter with blanks when setting up the correction, but that didnāt work, either. I simply gave up and resigned myself to typing character names out in full rather than continue with the aggravation of trying to get it to do what I want. Something which, by the way, takes all of ten seconds to set up in Word and WordPerfect.
This is the only thing I dislike about Scrivener, but it is quite annoying.
Maybe Iām not following what you are doing, but doesnāt the project auto-complete feature already do all of this? You add āJackā to it, and then hit āJā and instantly you have a suggestion to hit enter on (you may want to disable the āIn script mode onlyā option in Corrections, so you donāt have to hit Alt-= all of the time). It also takes even fewer than ten seconds to set it up as all you have to do is select the word or phrase you want in the list and hit Ctrl-G,Ctrl-A. You set that up in Project/Auto-Complete Listā¦.
As for the spell check engine in general, until such a time that we can either afford the millions to commission, or develop, our own to a level that Microsoft/Apple/Google/etc. has, or a better third-party solution comes along (that also doesnāt cost a fortune), weāre kind of stuck with Aspell. Iāve not noticed it requiring any more or less training than any other spell check out there, to be honest, they all lack a lot of jargon and suchābut I also never bother with that auto-correct stuff, so I guess it doesnāt impact me as much when it is wrongāI just hit Find Next or Ignore and move on.
Not really. In WordPerfect Iāve set my autocorrect to be āj=Jackā and then all I have to do is type ājā and as soon as I hit the space bar it becomes āJack.ā (This also works in Word) I tried doing this in Scrivener and what I got was every ājā turned to āJackā, so, for instance, if I wanted to say āJack enjoyed doing jumping jacksā, and typed āj enjoyed doing jumping jacksā, using a short cut for the character name, Iād end up with āJack enjackoyed doing jackumping jackacks.ā The program doesnāt recognize that only a ājā all by itself should be changed. It changes all of them. Adding spaces helped a little, but led to not making the correction if there wasnāt a leading space, for instance if the character name started the paragraph, and either inserting two spaces after the name or squishing the name into the next word. So I gave up on that route.
I then tried substitutions, figuring that might be the answer, but it drove me crazy to have suggestions pop up every time I typed that letter. Since I have a character named Edward, you can imagine how disrupting it was to have the suggestion āEdwardā pop up every time I typed an āeā.
Given that I was accustomed to being able to just type a letter and get a name with no muss, no fuss, I was truly disappointed to find it so awkward in Scrivener. Like I said, I love everything else about Scrivener, so itās sad that the spellcheck/autocorrect isnāt at the same level as WordPerfect and Word when so much else is so superior.
I might have to give this another try when I get some spare time. In the meantime, Iāve learned to put up with Aspell by turning it off.
I understand the financial issue with a better spell check now.
Question on auto complete:
when I pull up auto complete I donāt know what I am suppose to do
for example if I want āMā to be the letter for a characterās name, such as Michael
how do I set it up?
do I write
M=Michael
I would agree that substitutions arenāt the best implementation for what you are trying to do, but you could be using it much more effectively, too. You can use as many characters in the replacement sequence as you wish, which of course makes it much more practical to produce combinations that otherwise wouldnāt appear. For instance, āe1ā to āEdwardā. No tricks with suffix spacing necessary. But again, itās not the best solution, if not only because youāre stashing character names into an area that pertains to every project you work in.
Auto-Complete is pretty close to what you are describing though. I would say it is more a matter of habit than anything. Literally the same number of keystrokes are being used. In WordPerfect it is Space+j+Space. In Scrivener it is Space+j+return (or tab, whichever you find easiest). The trick is to leave a space on the end of words or phrases in the list so that you donāt have to type it in again after hitting return/tab.
Itās easier than that. You donāt have to assign anything. You just type in āMichaelā, and now when you hit āMā, or āMicā for that matter, it will suggest that as you type. And also, like I said above, you can just select a word after youāve typed it and press the shortcut, or right-click and choose to send the selection to the auto-complete list. That would be how you typically add most of the entries. But you can use the window, too. Either way is fine.
