Feature release: Spanish, French and Portuguese

Until August you could not really write a Spanish, French or Portuguese script here. An accented keystroke never reached the page, and a script pasted in came out of the PDF as garbage. We fixed that first: dead keys, AltGr and press-and-hold all work now, the PDF prints every accent, and a cue like JOSÉ is read as a character name instead of an action line.

That left spell check, which only knew English and underlined every second word of a Spanish page. As of today it knows four languages.

Four languages at once

There is no language setting. English, Spanish, French and Brazilian Portuguese are all on, for every script, and a word is correct if any of the four accepts it. We went that way because the bilingual scripts people write here switch language inside a sentence, and no per-project setting survives that. Right-click a flagged word and the suggestions come from all four dictionaries, ranked by how close they are, so "pelicula" offers "película" before anything French.

French elisions check as whole words. L'homme, qu'elle, jusqu'à and aujourd'hui pass as they are, with either kind of apostrophe. The screenwriting vocabulary the English checker already knew (steadicam, voiceover, ductwork) still passes, and Ignore still adds a word to your own dictionary for good.

The trade we accepted: an English typo that happens to be a word in one of the other three, like "dont" or "les", is no longer underlined. We think that is the right side of the trade for anyone writing in two languages.

How it loads

Spell check runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you write is sent anywhere to be checked. English arrives first, the way it always has, and the other three dictionaries come down in the background once and stay cached, so they work offline from the second visit.

If a script is written in dialect or full of invented names, spell check can still be turned off for that one script under Project Settings.

The interface and the scene heading keywords are still English, so INT. and EXT. stay as they are for now. There is a longer note on spell check in Getting Started.