Does anyone know of a way to have UK English spelling with the z-spelling variant that’s standard house style for most UK publishers (e.g. realize, not realise)? Word is fine with this, but on Scrivener I’ve had to switch the spellcheck off since the very prominent underlining of my (correctly) spelled words is distracting.
I couldn’t see any way of toning down this visual alert; nor, more helpfully, of making the Mac’s dictionary recognize z-spelling.
I guess I’ll have to export the finished project to Word for a final check, since running a spellcheck would be a useful thing to do at some point. (I’m going to look at this positively: it’ll probably be helpful not to be distracted by spelling mistakes while I’m drafting.)
There’s no way of doing this, I’m afraid - Scrivener just uses the standard Mac OS X spell-checker (whereas Word uses one built-in by Microsoft), and so Apple’s spell-checker determines the spellings it expects for each language.
Actually… There is a way, but it’s a little work. You would need to install an alternative spelling dictionary. You can do so by following instructions here:
So, you would follow the instructions on that page, downloading and installing the en_GB spelling dictionaries. You would then edit the en_GB.dic file by opening it in a text editor (such as TextWrangler), searching for “ise” (and possibly “ising”) and then replacing it with “ize” (or “izing”) where necessary. You’d then just save the file, and you’d be able to choose it as an alternative spelling dictionary.
I hadn’t even noticed that -ize was the house style of many English publishers - I know it’s closer to the Greek, but I’m still partial to my -ise endings.
Maybe you could switch to Canadian English? We use -ize, -re, and -our endings.
I’m sure there’s other differences of which I’m not aware, but it might be close enough?
You’d have to test it thoroughly, as in my experience every Can English dictionary is different. Take the word Annexe - the dict in Firefox thinks that’s incorrect, but Word and Scriv are both okay with it. Aluminium is flagged in both Firefox and Word, but Scriv says it’s correct.
Generally where there’s a difference between the listed Canadian spelling and the British, the dictionary in Scriv accepts both (airplane/aeroplane, artifact/artefact).
^ that’s assuming it’s not just because I did something odd when setting things up.
Thanks very much, everyone. I was excited by the Canadian option, but when I looked at your list (thank you for going to all that trouble!), I realized that there’d be unfamiliar oddities if I went that route. I’m used to having to apply z-spelling to manuscripts, and less often to anglicizing US, or more often mid-Atlantic, text (my day job is copy-editing). So I think the option of editing a dictionary would work better; and then, of course, I could also stop being irritated in Mail and other Mac apps.
But I think I’ll wait and see what my workflow ends up being, since there isn’t an instant fix. It may be that it’ll work to to a spell-check in a final copy-edit, which I may do in Word or InDesign, depending on what I do with my novel.
I do appreciate all your suggestions. Thanks again. (I guess I should really get onto Apple and suggest they upgrade their dictionary options, but I daresay they won’t want to know.)