Spellcheck doesn’t seem to work, even though I have it activated in the preferences:
Note the misspelling:
I miss muh red squiggles, bruh.
Moderator note: Moving this to the Mac technical support forum. 
rustyhinges, spell-check settings are now per project and found under Edit > Spelling and Grammar. “Correct spelling errors as you type” will only function in projects that also have Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Check Spelling While Typing enabled.
Ah, perfect. Thank you for responding!
So even though I’ve changed the global setting in the Preferences menu, I must also activate it in each project I open via Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Check Spelling While Typing?
So the Preferences > Corrections > Correct errors as you type option doesn’t actually do anything? Seems like selecting this in Preferences would override all until manually changed.
I’ve discovered over the years of using Scrivener 1, 2, and now 3, that NOTHING programmed into this app is accidental, so we just need to discover the logic of what Keith (and team) had in mind in making it function this way. Usually when we hear the method behind what we think is madness, we get that ‘ahhhhh’ moment clarity.
So short of troubling Keith with this nitnoid, can anyone guess why it was designed to with two ‘weapons armed’ switches just to enable spell check while typing? I can’t wrap my mind around the use case that drove this, but instinctively, I know there is one they had in mind.
New projects will be created using whatever you last set this to, so if you’ve enabled it in a project and then make a new project, that project will also have it already enabled. The point is to provide a little more flexibility within the limits of the Apple spell-check tool, so that you can, for instance, leave spell checking enabled in your non-fiction article project but turn it off in your sci-fi novel with all the made-up words that continually get flagged.
I have just discovered this. It seems a very counterintuitive way of doing things. Why are there now two settings for spelling and correcting?
The above thread answered my problem, but I had to find it using a Google search - but why put users to such efforts? It can be anticipated that a user’s first port of call to turn on spell-check would be to go to Preferences. And when that does not work, given that the Preferences do indeed contains spelling options, the user has no reason to suspect something else needs to be done. They then call Help Desk, assuming the software is buggy, or throw their arms up in horror, and give up on Scrivener, contributing to a myth, circulating on the internet, that Scrivener is too difficult to be worth the trouble.
This, I believe, is an example of how software developers are so immersed in their code that they forget how ordinary users interact with software.
An ordinary user first goes to Preferences. And if there are Spelling options in the Preferences panel, an ordinary user will not suspect there are additional settings in each separate Project.
For instance, in the Preferences panel, there could have been a helpful note to tell users that the spell-check settings actually need to be activated, on a file by file basis, in the actual document.
Small touches like that could save many users a wild goose chase, and when done on a global scale, can change Scrivener’s reputation as being too difficult for ordinary people into an app where its power comes from its accessibility, not just from its comprehensiveness of features.
It all comes down to the software developer being able to get inside the mind of ordinary users.
I’m not going to add to the UI philosophy-fest here. I’m just going to say that I’ve gotten caught on what feels like every single one of the “Preferences are for new projects only—to turn it on for your current project use the menu|keyboard shortcut|project preferences” duplicate controls. I’ve answered a number of posts from other confused users, helping them deal.
I understand that there are use cases where having certain preferences be global is not a good idea. But do they outweigh the confusion that is caused in simpler use cases by (apparently) having two means to achieve the same ends?
I don’t mean that as a rhetorical question, but as something for KB and his design team to thoughtfully consider, based on their technical support experience.
I’ve been mulling over this, even since my last post above.
For another piece of software that I use, that app has reached version 8 after a couple of decades in so doing becoming probably the most feature-packed add in its field. But incredibly complex to learn.
Their recent version’s focus has been on making things simpler to access.
Perhaps Scrivener 4’s focus could be on simplification of access to the features, rather than adding lots of new features.
I think the problem is that some users complain about how rigid the system is and suggest that the developers increase flexibility. When the developers do, after a while the system becomes unintuitively complex to users who wants less complexity. You can’t please all so the developers need to find a balance. But in the meantime they have themselves, of course, become extremely familiar with all possible settings so they don’t really see the complexity that newcomers experience.
Adding new features makes the software more flexible but also more difficult to use.
Per project settings are nice but currently only some settings are handled this way. Using the same logic as above, wanting to work with fixed width in the editor or not could differ between non-fiction and fiction projects, but this is not a per-project setting, is it?
Is there a general rule to separate which settings that are software-wide or per project?
just a question, but does anyone else find the spellcheck function useless sometimes? I have come across many errors by chance that Scrivener has not “picked up”.
For example, this sequence of words: “the rise fo new actors in this system ha been occurring for some time”.
Two errors here that Scrivener did not pick up (fo = of and ha = has).
Also, when I go through corrections and tell Scrivener to “learn” certain words, the system doesn’t seem to learn them and continues to pick them up as errors.
Short of the issues with having to enable the spellcheck in each project, is there something that I’m doing wrong which is causing this inconsistency? Eg, will spellcheck NOT find errors in documents that have had the spellcheck function turned on AFTER the document has been written?