Affinity Publisher 1.7.0.174 on Windows 7, 64bit (German) can auto-correct standard quotes into typographic quotes, which is very useful and a more-or-less standard feature in all serious writing software. Unfortunately, it appears that it can only correct English quotes ("stuff" into “stuff”). It would be nice if the auto-correction would take into account the currently selected language and use the most-often-used quote characters of that language, e.g. (zoomed for better visibility, would even be better with a serifed font):
English: “text” and ‘text’ (as is already done)
German: „text“ and ‚text‘
French: « text » and ‹ text ›
(plus others). This should more or less work flawlessly with the double quotes, but might be undesirable with the single quotes, because here, a closing German single quote (looking like a 6) and a German apostrophe (looking like a 9) cannot be distinguished via the usual algorithm. The same is valid for French (it's easy for English, because there, both apostrophe and closing single quote look the same). My suggestion for an algorithm with which to discern closing quotes and apostrophes would be as follows (as far as I know, no other program does that):
If a single quote is entered and the character before it is a space or opening bracket or similar, replace the single quote by an opening single quote (this is already done and should always yield nice results).
If a single quote is entered and the character before it is not one of the above, replace the single quote by a closing single quote (this is already done and yields good results, but might be wrong if apostrophes are desired).
(this is new) If a 'normal' textual character is entered and the character directly before it is a closing single quote, replace that closing single quote by an apostrophe. This would mean that in case of writing the words it's nice, the single quote would be replaced two times, but at least the end result would be correct...
To make it worse, some languages support more than one type of quotes: E.g., since the usual German quotes don't look very nice typographically, most German books use »this type«. Therefore, it would be wonderful if the user could select the auto-correction characters language-dependent manually. One could either include a (rather long and tedious) list of supported languages (as in the screenshot taken from a German text processor, which only supports typical languages used by Germans and is therefore not enough), or offer some edit fields for the user to fill in, as is currently done in PagePlus (which is nice).
Andreas Weidner
