Smart Quotes

[qwz]

Is there such feature?

I.e. « » instead of “ ”

[TomGerritzen]

Quotation marks differ wildly between languages. See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark. I doubt if the guys at Serif have language-dependent automatic quotation marks at the top of the list of features to be added. But I could be wrong.

[qwz]

Good Old Freehand has it in preferences

[walt.farrell]

Why (or when) would such smart quotes be needed? Wouldn't the user choose which quotes to use when typing the text?

[MikeW]

6 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Why (or when) would such smart quotes be needed? Wouldn't the user choose which quotes to use when typing the text?

Some keyboards cannot access certain quote marks easily. But this also comes into play when importing text, especially text files where they actually are most often straight quotes.

[TomGerritzen]

I can see the need for international users and users writing anything else than English. In a French text quotes look different; they’re called guillemets. In German the opening quotation mark is a low mark whereas in English a high mark is used. And on and on.

As I wrote earlier, it’s a language dependent thing. I find a drop down box not useful, because the choice should be made based on the language of the text. It took Freehand (and Microsoft Word) a few iterations to offer smart quotes in a certain way, and Publisher is still in beta. I don’t know how high it’s on the developer’s list, but I doubt if it’ll make to the first official release.

[benwiggy]

Yes, I'd definitely like to see this. Otherwise, I have to cut and paste to BBEdit just to Smarten the Quotes, and back.

[MikeTO]

I'm not saying this shouldn't be a priority, but IIRC there's an additional complexity with adding smart guillemots so it's not just a matter of changing the glyph used by the code. Guillemots are offset by the text they enclose by a non-breaking space. The code needs to be adapted to automatically convert the quotation mark and the space before or after, or to insert the non-breaking space if it was omitted.

[garrettm30]

I am lost at just what the feature being requested is. Publisher currently does do smart quotes differently per language when entered by keyboard. For example, when I type the literally character " while the language is set to French, Publisher does properly substitute the opening or closing guillemet along with the required narrow non-breaking space. So that much is working already. So is the current request:

A) To be able to change the quotation style for a given language (which would also meet the needs certain other languages and regional varieties besides the supported languages).

B) To be able to translate straight quotes in text already entered or when pasted rather than typed.

C) Something else, indicating I clearly missed the point.

[MikeTO]

6 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

I am lost at just what the feature being requested is. Publisher currently does do smart quotes differently per language when entered by keyboard. 

Oh sorry, somebody replied to this old thread which must have been before international smart quotes were added. Since I'm working just in English I wasn't aware that the feature did exist, thanks for clearing that up. I am confused as to what the request is, too. I assume it's how to deal with text that lacks smart quotes.

[VJS]

garrettm30

I definitely need an answer to your B). Pasting text and not being able to change straight quotes for smart quotes is a real pain. Even Word 2011 has that ability.