I’m going to be editing my second draft in Scrivener 2. I wanted to know if there was a way to import my custom dictionary words and substitutions from my old Scrivener 1 project instead of putting them in manually?
TL;DR
Inside Scrivener, not so far as I know.
If you know what you’re doing, there are ways outside of Scrivener to accomplish these ends.
The Personal Wordlist
I do not see a way to import from one to the other inside Scrivener. However, here’s a couple of ways to do this outside of Scrivener.
WARNING: These are quick and dirty ways to copy one wordlist to another. The wordlist formats are the same. Please have Scrivener NOT running when you do this.
The wordlists have this format:
General
personal=logistics, sui generis, lorem, ipsumThere may be more to it than that. If you have more than one “something=” line, you’ll want to copy them separately in Method 2, below. I’ve not seen anything appear in there but “personal=”, though.
Version 1.9 uses “Appdata \ Local \ Scrivener \ Scrivener \ wordlists.ini” as its wordlist.
They’re in a simple comma-separated list; apostrophes are represented as “x2019” in mine.
Version 2.9 uses “Appdata \ Local \ LiteratureandLatte \ Scrivener\ wordlists.ini” as its wordlist.
Method 1: Rename v2.9 original file, copy 1.9 file, paste into v2.9 folder.
If you’ve not added any personal words to ver 2.9.x, this is likely the best method.
Rename the file in version 2.9 (“Appdata \ Local \ LiteratureandLatte \ Scrivener\ wordlists.ini”) to wordlists.ini.bak.
Copy the file “Appdata \ Local \ Scrivener \ Scrivener \ wordlists.ini”.
Paste into the folder "Appdata \ Local \ LiteratureandLatte \ Scrivener ".
Done.
Start the Scrivener 3 Beta and in Options → Corrections, click “View personal word list.” Everything should be there.
Method 2: Copy v2.9 file to backup, copy contents from 1.9 file, paste contents into v2.9 file, save.
If you’ve already put words into your personal dictionary, you can copy and paste from one to the other.
Copy the v2.9 wordlist FILE (“Appdata \ Local \ Scrivener \ Scrivener \ wordlists.ini”) to wordlists.ini.bak. That’s your backup.
Use Wordpad or Notepad or Your favorite text editor; open “Appdata \ Local \ Scrivener \ Scrivener \ wordlists.ini”. Turn Wordwrap off (so you can see any other "something= "lines, which you want to handle separately). Select everything on the line after “personal=”; copy.
Open “Appdata \ Local \ LiteratureandLatte \ Scrivener\ worlists.ini”; set the cursor right after “personal=”. Paste. Save.
If there ARE other “something=” lines, you’ll want to copy their contents in the same way. If the new file doesn’t have those, copy the entire line, including the “something=” part, and paste in the 2.9 file. Save.
You may want to filter through that and see if you’ve got any duplicates. I don’t know what duplicates do to 2.9, not having tried.
Run Scrivener 2.9.x and see if it worked. If not, you did something wrong. Restore your backed up wordlists.ini file and try again.
Corrections/Autocorrect/Substitutions
There is no way to import this that I can find inside Scrivener 3.
However, Scrivener saves its substitution list in the Registry. It appears to be in the same format in both versions (why change what works?).
Warning: you can really screw your computer up if you don’t make correct entries in the Registry. I tested this and it worked on my installation of Windows 10 and my installations of Scrivener.
If you’ve only got a few entries in your substitutions file, I suggest using manual entry methods. But doing that can be more of a problem than mucking with the registry. In the absence of export and import functions for the autocorrection and substitution lists, this will work.
When you absolutely MUST, here’s the method:
Quit all versions of Scrivener.
Use regedit.exe.
Under HKEY_CURRENT_USER:
Find Software/Scrivener/Scrivener/Autocorrection.
Click that entry.
File->Export it to ver1-9.reg.
Find Software/LiteratureandLatte/Scrivener/Autocorrection.
Click that entry.
File->Export it to ver2-9.reg.
It automatically exports to the Documents folder on my machine (Win 10).
Using File Explorer, copy ver2-9.reg to ver2-9-work.reg (that’s our work file; the other one is the backup in case things break).
Using notepad, open ver1-9.reg.
Find the “SubstitutionList” entry and select all of it, down to the end of the numbers.
Copy.
Using notepad, open ver2-9-work.reg.
Find the “SubstitutionList” entry and select all of it, down to the end of the numbers.
Paste.
Save.
Exit notepad.
In file explorer, double click on ver2-9-work.reg (our work file).
Click yes both times (if you have user account control set up. Otherwise, once).
Your substitution list has been copied.
Start Scrivener 2.9.x and check that everything works.
Do these 2 procedures need to be replicated after every Beta version?
I don’t have a problem with my personal wordlist ini file, but mucking with the registry to handle autocorrects every couple of months or less seems like a very bad idea. Do the autocorrects at least remain with new beta releases.
This worked perfectly, thank you!
As for the substitutions I ended up just doing those manually. I didn’t have as many as I thought.
IMHO, using the registry to save autocorrection list entries is a perhaps-not-good idea to begin with. But that was the design choice for some reason.
I honestly don’t know. I don’t have any personalized autocorrect entries; I had to add a couple to test this procedure for them.
if you’ve got a lot of autocorrection entries (which some might), I’d suggest backing up that particular registry entry before updating the Beta.
But my personal wordlist (which has 13 entries or so) hasn’t been touched by multiple installs, and it’s the same as it was in version 1.9.x. I’m thinking of adding them to my custom dictionary file. Not sure just how that will work, but I know it’s possible. Maybe write a utility to check that file on Scrivener exit, add any entries to the dictionary and delete the changes from the file.
It seems possible to manage this using NotePad ++ . You may also wish to use Extend Office
I use Notepad++ for the purpose. I rarely use autocorrect, anyway, but at times it’s really helpful, so I understand why some folks might use it quite a bit more than I do.
It’s been almost 2 years since that post, too.