LibreOffice Writer quotations and apostrophe

Mark Moore

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Back when I was using Word on my old computer, I was able to copy-and-paste my old Notepad-written stories into Word and do simple replace-quote-with-quote and replace-apostrophe-with-apostrophe to change the generic straight vertical lines of the old quotation marks and apostrophes into curvy versions.

Not so in LibreOffice Writer, which I have to use on my new computer, because my old Office 2003 won't install on my new comp. In order to replace the apostrophes, I have to actually find a curvy apostrophe and put that in the With field. Same thing with the quotation marks.

Also, Word auto-corrected the closing quotes, but LibreOffice doesn't, so, when I replace a vertical-lines quotation mark with a curvy open quotation mark, it uses curvy open quotation marks throughout, even at the ends of quotes.

Any way to fix all of these problems without having to manually go through every instance?
 

merry_and_silver

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Hi,

Not sure about finding curly quotation marks directly in OpenOffice. If you have them ready to paste, then:

In the Find & Replace dialogue, there is a More Options drop down menu. In that menu you can check Regular expressions, which allows you to find and replace text based on regular expressions, instead of an exact match.

After checking Regular expressions in the Find & Replace dialogue, writing ([.?!,])" in the Search for box and $1” in the Replace with box, should fix your quotation marks at the end of a sentence or after a comma. Writing "([A-Z]|[a-z]) in the Search for box and “$1 in the Replace with box, should fix your quotation marks at the beginning of a sentence or the continuation of a quote. The quotation marks in the Search for boxes in these examples are the straight up and down kind, and the quotation marks in the Replace with boxes are the appropriate curly kind.

I didn't test these regular expressions in LibreOffice (and you should ALWAYS test regular expressions, as you will soon find out), but they should work. Regex is kind of a complicated topic, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just learning a little bit. There are cheat sheets all over the web. Best.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I'll have to look into that. I never use curly quotes in anyting I want to submit because they can cause problems, but there are times when I'd like to make that change. LibreOffice isn't my primary word processor, but I always keep the latest version on my computer, and use it every now and then.
 

merry_and_silver

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That's my approach too. I write in text and don't change characters or format unless I have to, at the very end. I have enough problems without a word processor thinking it knows what kind of help I need.