I’m a technical writer and I write about WordPress. I’ve set up Scrivener to replace long words and phrases I use over and over again, and this worked until recently. Not sure when it changed, but it doesn’t work now.
I have the following abbreviations that expand to links and long phrases set in Options > Corrections > Substitutions.
wpc
wpctos
wpcf
I type wpc and before I can get to tos or f, it auto corrects for the first one and won’t allow me the others.
I assume I could change them to wpc, wcptos, and wpfc or some other letter combinations, but why would it substitute on the wpc and not the wp? Is there a third letter trigger or something in Scrivener that says substitutions are limited to three letters? Why won’t it wait until I hit punctuation or the space bar?
I feel like I’m doing something wrong, missed some setting. I’ve turned off “Suggest completions” as I don’t want that window popping up, and “Correct spelling errors as you type” is also turned off. Should it be on? “Enable additional substitutions” is on, of course, to enable the substitutions.
Suggestions or is this a bug?
Thanks.
The substitutions just work exactly as entered, so it’s substituting on “wpc” because you have a substitution set up for that letter combination. You can add a space to the end of the abbreviation in the “Replace” field of the substitutions to prevent it triggering before you hit the spacebar.
By adding a space to the abbreviation, I now have to type wpc-space-space to make it appear, but at least the other ones work. Very odd behavior. It would be much easier if the behavior matched that of other programs by initiating the substitution on the space or punctuation. I’ll learn how to space-space for this shortcut. Thanks.
You could add another unique character to the wpc shortcut to distinguish it if that’s easier than a space. The substitutions aren’t a complex tool; they’re for simple symbol substitution, correcting spelling of words with accents, that sort of thing. For more powerful substitution control and flexibility, you could check out a dedicated tool that would work across multiple programs–Breevy, AutoHotKey, etc. You can do a lot more with those and keep it consistent across all your software, which can be handy.
How about instead of:
wpc
wpctos
wpcf
use:
wpc
wpc1
wpc2
I just did a quick test and that seems to work as expected.
Edit: actually it also seems to work as expected if you just shorten wpctos to wpct.