So, I am a Danish Scrivener-user. I have some projects in English and some in Danish. I recently discovered that the spell-checker settings for Scrivener seem to be global, so that when I start a new document, changes the language to Danish, then goes back to my English document, it is now treating that as Danish. Is that really the way it works? Is there a way to designate a language for each document separately?
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There’s not currently a way to set a different dictionary per project. This is something on our “would be nice to have” list for the future, so we may devise a way of implementing it at some point down the road. For now, you’ll need to switch the dictionary language in Options as you’ve been doing. If the red squiggles are bothersome, you might prefer to disable the option to “Check spelling as you type” and just run the spell check manually from the Tools menu when you know it is set to the appropriate language.
Sorry to get back to this so late. Though it’s an irritation, I can get by with changing the language when changing projects. It’s not that often I switch back and forth between projects in different languages.
However, I do think this is a feature that would make Scrivener a lot more attractive to many people who - like me - work in more than one language. This would include academics, but also a fair number of journalists with a language other than English as their native language who work in English and their native language.
As a matter of fact, I think a fair number of academics, particularly in humanities, will frequently need to include quotes in one language in the middle of a text in another. I realise that including a language tag inside a document may be a lot of hassle for a relatively small crowd but still.
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I do this hesitantly, not wanting to violate etiquette by making another software recommendation, and realizing that this will not solve your issue in using Scrivener, but: for academics who work in multiple languages there is a word processor and research suite called Nota Bene that changes easily between languages, and marks those changes for spell-checking and other purposes. It does not have all the organizational capabilities of Scrivener when one is in the process of arranging one’s notes and ideas, but is excellent for many other purposes.
Has any progress been made in being able to set specific dictionaries for a specific project, or, even better, a specific section of a project? I really like the spellchecking feature and use it daily; I am working in both Swedish and English in the same project (a PhD thesis on archaeology in Sweden, so I really need both languages).
I have no difficulties in switching between the dictionaries via the “options > corrections” menu, but find it somewhat inconvenient when I am quoting text from photos of find catalogs in Swedish in the research section of the project (where the spellcheck is invaluable in helping me be certain I have typed it correctly), and then writing about the find in English in the document itself. This process can have me switching languages several times an hour, so it would be nice if I could just tell Scrivener one time that section A is English, and section B is Swedish, and so on.
I would like to make a further suggestion about the “Personal Word List”, which just now contains all of the words in both languages which I have “taught” it. It would be helpful if it kept a separate list for each language, so if I accidentally type a word in the wrong language for the section I am currently working, in it will call attention to it, even though the program knows that word is spelled correctly for the other language.
Thank you for considering my requests, and for making such a wonderful program–the ability to organize everything about my thesis, in very minute detail, is what will make completing this degree possible.
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