Applies to ScribeWright 1.1.117
Preferences
Tools ▸ Preferences… (Ctrl+,) holds settings about you and this PC: they apply to every book you open here. (Settings that belong to a particular book live in Book Setup.)
The window works like Word’s Options: pick a page down the left, and the page’s settings appear on the right. Every change applies the moment you make it, so you can watch a color or theme land; OK keeps them and Cancel puts everything back as it was. ScribeWright reopens on the page you used last, and F1 opens this topic at that page.
General
Appearance: Light, Dark, or Follow Windows, plus the accent color used for selection and highlights. If Windows High Contrast is on, it overrides all of this; ScribeWright defers to your chosen contrast theme.
Reader theme is the tint the Style Editor’s preview wears: Paper (the book as it renders), Sepia, or Night. The View tab’s Reader ▾ dropdown switches it too. The exported book is never tinted.
Editor sets which editor a book opens in: Visual (the page) or Code (the XHTML source, with the page hidden). View ▸ Show ▸ Visual Editor switches for the session without changing this default. See Code-first editing.
Show line numbers in the visual editor numbers every paragraph, heading and break in the page’s margin. Each number is one line of the chapter’s source, so it matches the Code pane and gives you something to cite in notes to an editor. Nothing is added to the chapter itself.
Writing
Writing goals: book and daily word targets, shown in the status bar. Zero disables. See Writing Goals.
Spelling: check-as-you-type on or off, the preferred language, and My Dictionary…, the personal word list shared by all your books. See Spelling.
Contraction Checker: whether the review list starts with the unambiguous suggestions already ticked.
Formatting Rules
Customize… opens the rule editor for a formatting profile (fiction or non-fiction; a book picks its profile in Book Setup).
The rules are listed by family (Punctuation, Numbers, Dialogue, Structure, and Markup), and each family’s heading counts how many of its rules are on ("Punctuation (9 of 11 on)"). Type in the Filter box to narrow the list to rules whose name or description contains what you typed; Enabled only hides the rules you have turned off. Tick or untick a rule to turn it on or off. Pick a rule and the panel beside the list describes it and says whether Layout Review can fix it automatically or leaves it for you to review; the What this rule does link opens its entry in the Formatting Rules topic.
Severity is how strictly a rule is reported: a Suggestion is a style preference you may disagree with, a Warning is almost certainly unintended, and an Error would make the book wrong. Change it from the panel, or right-click one or more selected rules and pick the severity; it applies to the whole selection, as does the panel’s On switch.
The shared settings below the panel are values several rules read:
- Spell out numbers up to: numbers up to this value are expected as words; larger ones as figures.
- Heading case: whether headings are checked for Title Case or left as typed.
- Chapter headings: the pattern every chapter title follows ("Chapter N", "Chapter One", …).
- Dialogue tags: the verbs that mark speech ("said", "asked"), used to judge the punctuation around a quote.
- Scene-break glyphs: the marks a scene break may use.
List entries are separated by commas.
Save keeps these choices for every book that uses the profile (a copy of the profile is written under your user settings); Reset to built-in removes that copy so ScribeWright’s defaults apply again. Layout Review follows the change on its next Rescan, and the generated Formatting Rules topic shows rules you turned off as off.
Colors
Fine-tune the visual editor’s page, paper, text, caret, and selection colors, and the Code pane’s full syntax palette, separately for light and dark (the page says which set you are editing), with a Reset to theme defaults for each if an experiment goes wrong.
The rest of the editor’s chrome follows from those five: the "Start writing" placeholder, block-quote text and bar, the ring around the paper and the scrollbar are derived from your paper and text colors so they stay readable (at least 4.5:1) on any combination you pick, and in High Contrast the shadows disappear entirely.
Printing
The manuscript printer’s page: font, size and line spacing; the author/title header and page numbers; orientation and paper; and the margins in inches. The print window offers the same settings and both write the same values, so whichever you change last wins.
Where Preferences Live
Preferences are saved per-user on this PC (not in the book), so your
setup follows you between books but never ships with a manuscript.
Customized formatting profiles live beside them as %APPDATA%\ScribeWright\Profiles\<name>.rules.json.