Hi, I may have missed a thread on this, but it’s something that has been frustrating me. In MS Word, I’m accustomed to the most obvious word substitutions (teh = the), but where there might be multiple options for the software to select, it leaves it up to me. And if a word is wrong, but spelled correctly, it’s up to me to find. I’m used to that.
I have found that Scrivener is going well beyond this. Scrivener is changing my words. Two examples from today: A character named Craddock became Braddock. “Inclusivity” became “inclusively.” I have, on several occasions, gone back re-read a paragraph I had just written, and found it included words I hadn’t written, which materially changed the meaning. I’ve watched it change a word I meant to use, and spelled correctly, to another word altogether.
I realize that I could turn off the auto-correct, or populate a personal dictionary with character and place names, but how far do I have to take it? And will that dictionary be available in my next project when I start new? What about the inclusivity example? Please help!
Eight years later and I’m still finding this is the case. Scrivner does not look at any kind of grammar or contextually, it just takes a stab at whatever it happens to think a specific word may be. I sometimes type “yma” for “may” and Scrivner automagically thinks I want it to be Amy. I’m a messy typer. My fingers fly all over the place when I get caught up in the moment. While I love Scrivner for lots of things, I’m not sure I should be using it to actually create.
To be clear, Scrivener is bereft of any features along these lines. Whatever you see happening is either coming from your macOS settings, or potentially some third-party grammar tool you have installed. Even smart quotes, for example, are coming from the OS.[1] We do have a number of checkboxes in the Corrections settings tab which you should review, which switch on or off various Mac features. There are others worth reviewing in System Settings: Keyboard, as well.
These days, it may also be that turning off spell check while typing is necessary, because Apple has come to believe that this means you want invasive iOS style suggestion bubbles to appear. That would really annoy me. I prefer a setup where nothing happens except precisely what is typed in.
the option to use faux old fashioned superscript style ordinals is one exception. ↩︎