It might well be high-time windows users got something that wasn’t just an lesser imitation of what MacOS users have. I mean if it becomes something that MacOs users start clamouring for then that would only give more justification and signal that maybe using the OS’s built in spell checking may not be worth the limitations it places on the usability.
As for what happens if procjects are synced well. I’d imagine nothing. Nothing other than having to deal with the custom wordlist not being the one you’re looking for and then having to simply ignore the spellcheck errors or manually check the errors until you can get it back to a Windows desktop. Remember all that is being done is renaming and changing the file names. Program looks for file called wordlist.ini if I change wordlist.ini to wordlist.baskerville and wordlist.dune to wordlist.ini. well There’s not really muchg difference from the program’s perspective is it. You’re not asking the program to read from a different file. its the same file in the end.
At worst you’ll have to train the MAc/Ios devices custom wordlist, and best you can simply turn off the spellchecker and ignore it. That may seem a little callous but that’s exactly what a lot of use have to do right now (well not me since I have my new trick).
When you’re writing something along the lines of a Fantasy or Sci-Fi novel and you happen to work on multiple novels the current Spell checker is essentially useless. It might as well be turned off because you can’t train i by adding custom words because then you have confusions where similar words appear between two different novels or stories.
Just a simple automation like what I fleshed out would at least give the WIndows users a little respite from having to do the spell-checking in another program.
As said. I’ve already got my work around and already. Just be nice if it was a feature and not a work around.
I don’t think high-time Windows users get is a good argument for a feature. The L&L guys are working hard to bring feature parity between the 2 platforms. I’m guessing Mac was always ahead in the past due to that being Keith’s platform of choice, and originally where the customers were perhaps.
Feature parity going forward is solid sense so there is seamless file transfer and no surprises with data.
Wordlist.ini file contains a single key-value pair where the key is “personal” and the value is the list of words. Adding more pairs doesn’t bother Scrivener, so it’s quite possible to keep many lists in a single file and switch between them by renaming keys. Similar to BigT29’s idea, writing a script that automates this is trivial but doing so safely is not. Scrivener appears to load word lists at start up. so you can use a separate wordlist in several simultaneously opened projects, just so long as you don’t try to add a word to the list. I haven’t tried what would happen then, but as a (former) developer I can imagine a few dozen possibilities, ranging from unpleasant to really bad.
I saw this as I was looking for some what to create auto-gen links for Characters, etc., and the back and forth I’ve seen makes me think there might be a way to kill two birds with one stone.
I strongly back the case for personalised in-Project Word Lists.
WORDS ARE OUR BUSINESS!!!
I am creating a whole universe with several THOUSAND non-standard words: lots of proper nouns of places and people and clans; lots of fantasy names for creatures and effects and artefacts; lots of religious terms in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit; and a whole lot beside! Not only do I want to be able to place these all in the Project, I also want to split them according to their type AND then create glossaries according to type.
This rings true for EVERY writer out there - fiction or non-fiction. New words and specialist jargon is rife in everything, as are proper nouns. I have been using Scrivener for less than a week and I am already adding pretty mundane standard words to its limited dictionary, let alone the thousands of my own devising!
I WILL SAY AGAIN: WORDS ARE OUR BUSINESS and without proper vocabulary management tools and grammar checkers, Scrivener is falling way short of my expectations despite the glowing plaudits it receives elsewhere.
Tools to enable the accurate use and management of ALL WORDS should sit at the heart of the software, NOT be some peripheral add on with throw-away excuses towards platform limitations and the like. It is overcoming those sorts of poor excuses that inspired Scrivener’s creation, so it is time to realise THE WORDS ARE KING.
I completely agree with you, Nobbo. We create words and I’m sick of the red squiggly lines telling me a word is incorrect when it is a self-created word.
Thanks that you agree - I got a mauling from everyone else!
EVERY writer uses words that are not in dictionaries, be they from technical language and jargon, legalese, place names, proper names, other languages, local terms for all manner of things, slang, joke words, foul language, or utterly made up fiction. It is harder to NOT use it!
Scrivener remains a 6/10 for me, and only that because it is so utterly cheap and perfect for the Kindle Crowd - though I think even Word would be ok for a linear novel or two - otherwise it would be a fail. I am hopefully this year going to take my writing to some publishers so I hope none of them laugh at me and tell me I need to transpose it all onto something else…
But the IT industry is at the mercy of a few giants, so I guess things move slowly at first and then grind to a halt pending approval from - and fat donations to - those Upon High. It is a shame because the world still needs a great document creating package and a great spreadsheet/database package for all to have access to.
Anyway, thanks again, I stopped reading this thread as it was just a mass of I’m Alright Jacks saying how wonderful it had all been for them and what was I thinking about complaining?
So checking back on this.
Have any of t he recent updates added this feature or implemented some form of workaround to the issue that brought about this suggestion?
Ahh. I see. So same as always. And yeah. i know there’s a way around. See earlier on in this topic. But as you say it’s a schlep. Why I kinda stopped using Scrivener to do any actual writing. Mostly just use it as a compile and export tool.
Do the writing and final editing/checking in another app. And if i need to export to something the app doesn’t that scrivener does…then I just copy the finished thing over.
It is much easier for me. Especially since I switch between projects quite frequently. Even more so now than I did back then since I do more professional script writing for video productions, etc.
The app i use isn’t as convenient in other regards as Scrivener (though it is being worked on) , but any gains in productivity and time saving i get through Scrivener are torpedoed into the negatives by the Spell-Checking issue.
I’d kinda hoped all this time would have seen some change…but…seems not.
Ah well. Maybe Scrivener 4.
