A question of Word formatting. [straight quotes/curly quotes]

Tiergan · Jan 30, 2011

Anyone know how to replace the straight quotes with the curved version?

I think what happened is when I changed my font on the piece, the straight quotes of courier stayed, and all the new ones I enter with TNR are curved.

Guardian · Jan 30, 2011

Mine always had something to do with the autocorrect feature. You should be able to find that through one of the drop-down menus.

Lyxdeslic · Jan 30, 2011

Odd. You should be able to highlight the entire text and choose TNR. In theory, that would change all your quotes as well. If not, and this would take a helluva lot longer, you'd have to do a search and replace. That would suck.

Good luck.

Lyx

alleycat · Jan 30, 2011

Are you sure to want to use smart quotes?

If you do, go to Tools > AutoCorrect > AutoFormat and AutoFormat as you type.

Guardian · Jan 30, 2011

alleycat said:
Are you sure to want to use smart quotes?

If you do, go to Tools > AutoCorrect > AutoFormat and AutoFormat as you type.

This. I like the way they look but I ended up getting rid of them because of errors they would cause.

scarletpeaches · Jan 30, 2011

Highlight one of your straight quotes, right click, then hit copy.

Go to your Word options menu. (I use MS Word 2007 so your version may be slightly different).

Go to the auto-corrections menu and the auto-format as you type menu.

Make sure 'replace straight quotes with smart quotes' is ticked, okay it, come out of all those menus.

When you're back in your document, hit CTRL-A to highight all, then CTRL-P to search & replace.

Go to the top box and paste your original straight quotes (or hit CTRL-V to do so).

In the bottom box, type the quote mark. Then hit 'replace all'.

maestrowork · Jan 30, 2011

Don't use the smart quotes. Keep them straight. You'd be glad later when you have to reformat your ms. as en e-mail or export it to text, etc.

scarletpeaches · Jan 30, 2011

I've never had anyone ask me to use straight quotes. If they did, it's an easy fix with search & replace.

Tiergan · Jan 30, 2011

maestrowork said:
Don't use the smart quotes. Keep them straight. You'd be glad later when you have to reformat your ms. as en e-mail or export it to text, etc.

AHHHHH!!!! Smashes head into wall. I just replaced them all.

I didnt think search and destroy, well, find and replace, would work. Was worried it would make all the beginnings on both sides, but no the computer fixed it. Well at least they are all of one kind now. And I can dumb them if needed. Damn topic of styles has me all out of whack, lol, but gave me the much needed break from editing.

Thank you all for your comments.

Triphi · Jan 30, 2011

I just had the same problem, but with Pages for Mac instead of Word. I did a find/replace, typing double quotes into both, and it changed all of them to smart quotes.

I know in Pages there's a box under preferences you can check/uncheck - something like "display smartquotes". Maybe Word has something like that so you can change them back to straight.

Sentosa · Jan 30, 2011

Most word processors have a feature/tool that provides auto correction.

Find it and turn off things like the automatic conversion of straight commas to curly; -- to em dash; there are more than I'm going to list here.

BudBoxer · Jan 30, 2011

This is one of those things that WordPerfect makes way easy but MicroSoft Word complicates. To set straight quotes as your default for all fonts, all documents, go to Word Options on the home icon (ok, this is Word 2007, botom right) and in TWO places set "straight quotes" or decativate "smart quotes." Not once, but in two places. That's the trick. Keep clicking through all the choices on "Word Options" until you find two and change both. That should work.

Signed, Fellow Smart Quote Hater...

Sentosa · Jan 30, 2011

BudBoxer said:
This is one of those things that WordPerfect makes way easy but MicroSoft Word complicates.

Too true. I thought nothing would lure me away from WordPerfect 12, but Windows 7 64-bit did. WP12 does not like Win7 (or perhaps vice versa).

Don't like the interface on the 3 latest version of WP, so had to change to something completely new. Very happy with the new WP, so all ends well.

BudBoxer · Jan 30, 2011

@ Sentosa, in Yank English please. I missed something.

Actually, a lot of my faves don't play well with Windows. Want to choke it. No terroristic threats intended, Mr. Gates, if you or your minions are listening...

dangerousbill · Jan 30, 2011

scarletpeaches said:
Highlight one of your straight quotes...
Go to the top box and paste your original straight quotes (or hit CTRL-V to do so)...In the bottom box, type the quote mark. Then hit 'replace all'.

That was no more difficult than landing a 747.

Smart quotes are easier to remove than add. If they're left turned on in Autoformat (Under Format), you'll get them automatically as you type.

The only problem comes if you have a leading right quote, as in:
'twas the night before Christmas.

There's probably an elegant way to do this, but I type a dummy word and follow it with a single quote (which automatically appears as a right quote), then a space, then the word twas .

Then I delete the dummy word and remove the space to bring the right quote snug up against the twas.

a' twas --> ' twas --> 'twas (where ' is a right-hand single quote)

BudBoxer · Jan 30, 2011

@ Dangerousbill, writing is so hard.

benbradley · Jan 30, 2011

I never use smart quotes. The original ASCII character set doesn't support them.

dangerousbill · Jan 30, 2011

benbradley said:
I never use smart quotes. The original ASCII character set doesn't support them.

I can get straight quotes whenever I want with a little seance with Find/Replace.

But if I want to send camera-ready or a pdf file or a POD house (to lulu.com, for example), I want those curly ones in there.

dangerousbill · Jan 30, 2011

BudBoxer said:
@ Dangerousbill, writing is so hard.

Boron carbide is hard; writing is difficult.

Sentosa · Jan 30, 2011

BudBoxer said:
@ Sentosa, in Yank English please.

Sorry I don't speak Yank.

bonitakale · Jan 31, 2011

dangerousbill said:
The only problem comes if you have a leading right quote, as in:
'twas the night before Christmas.

There's probably an elegant way to do this, but I type a dummy word and follow it with a single quote (which automatically appears as a right quote), then a space, then the word twas .

Then I delete the dummy word and remove the space to bring the right quote snug up against the twas.

a' twas --> ' twas --> 'twas (where ' is a right-hand single quote)

Or, just type two single quotes and delete the first one. But it's very annoying, and I use only straight quotes.

benbradley · Jan 31, 2011

dangerousbill said:
I can get straight quotes whenever I want with a little seance with Find/Replace.

But if I want to send camera-ready or a pdf file or a POD house (to lulu.com, for example), I want those curly ones in there.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think of those so-called curly quotes as typesetting quotes.

And I've always wondered why someone would use a typesetting program (not exactly what MS Word was originally designed for, but that's what it has partially evolved into) to write what they know is going to be their first draft.

dangerousbill · Jan 31, 2011

benbradley said:
And I've always wondered why someone would use a typesetting program (not exactly what MS Word was originally designed for, but that's what it has partially evolved into) to write what they know is going to be their first draft.

Why not? Why two programs to do the same thing? I've heard of people who composed novels on Linotype machines. What could possibly be more awkward? But they did it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine
(URL because not everyone knows what a Linotype is)

Word turns out to be a good program for interior book design, unless you have diagrams and photos, which seem to confuse Word to no good end. I'm in the middle of preparing an ms for POD for a friend right now, using Word 2000.

Deleted member 42 · Jan 31, 2011

benbradley said:
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think of those so-called curly quotes as typesetting quotes.

Back in the day, we called 'em printer's quotation marks.

When MSWord first supported them in 1989 in Word 4.0, they called them "smart quotes." They were stupid then about implementing them, and about em-dashes.

They still are.

Deleted member 42 · Jan 31, 2011

dangerousbill said:
Word turns out to be a good program for interior book design, unless you have diagrams and photos, which seem to confuse Word to no good end. I'm in the middle of preparing an ms for POD for a friend right now, using Word 2000.

You can do a decent job, but you can't kern. You can't adjust baseline, you can't access the full postscript data in expert fonts, and Word uses a rough estimate system for producing postscript data regarding line height, which means super- and sub-script type isn't handled properly, not to mention that Word does the calculation for reduction for super and sub internally, rather than using the rendered data in the postscript font.

It's good enough for some purposes, but these are things to keep in mind, especially if your output is 2400 DPI or better.

A question of Word formatting. [straight quotes/curly quotes]

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Deleted member 42

Deleted member 42