First of all, the abc button on the menu bar is unresponsive.
When I select ‘spelling and grammar/check document now’ the cursor moves to the next word in my text that is underlined in red, and if I reverse-click on the word I can select the correct spelling, but the cursor doesn’t then move on to the next misspelled word.
If I hit apple-comma, up pops an unrelated menu called ‘general’ where I can see no reference to spell check.
Apple-, is the shortcut for Preferences in most Mac applications, and the first pane of our preference panel is indeed called “General”. Is this what you are referring to? The shortcut for the Spelling & Grammar tool is Cmd-: but you can also look that up in the Edit/Spelling/Spelling and Grammar/Show Spelling and Grammar menu.
The first thing I would have you check is to open Apple’s TextEdit utility, which you’ll find in the main Applications menu, and see if you can call up the spelling panel from there. If you cannot, then you’ve got some kind of OS X problem calling up the panel. The reason why I ask you check here first is that Scrivener isn’t actually doing anything beyond letting OS X do its thing here. There could be something in the software conflicting with the OS on your system (it’s not a universal problem however), but its more likely something is glitched with your spell check engine.
I got the shortcut wrong. Apple-, is the spellcheck shortcut in one of the screenwriting programmes I use. Sorry – that was the daft thing I was doing wrong!
Once I was using the correct shortcut I did indeed manage to call up the spelling panel in TextEdit, and subsequently successfully called it up via the keyboard shortcut in Scrivener.
So it seems that the only problem lies with the unresponsive spell check button on the toolbar. Any thoughts on that?
I can’t think of any reason for why this button wouldn’t work. We are talking about the one labelled “Spelling” that looks like “abc” underlined in red? That toggles the palette for me no matter what, though naturally if I’m not currently in a text editor it will be empty when it appears. Try re-installing the software, perhaps the user interface file got damaged.