Curly quote inserted before a character when I change from capital letter to small letter?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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Hi, everyone,

I’m working on a Mac Mini OS 13.7.1 in Scrivener 3.5.2 and I’ve been adding in HTML in the editor to create ALT tags in my epub. I noticed something odd:

This text has a Raw HTML block style. When I edit the folder name images to Images, Scrivener inserts a curly quote. Obviously, this messes up my HTML and I have to hunt for them. Can I prevent this from happening?

<figure><img src="images/TripleRudolf_36pt_900x150JPG_BEST.jpg" alt="decorative reindeer icons" id="<$img:TripleRudolf_36pt_900x150JPG_BEST>" /></figure>

Example with curly quote that appeared after I capitalized Images:

<figure><img src=“Images/TripleRudolf_36pt_900x150JPG_BEST.jpg" alt="decorative reindeer icons" id="<$img:TripleRudolf_36pt_900x150JPG_BEST>" /></figure>

Thanks for any ideas!

Regards,

Laurel

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Either don’t edit HTML (or any code) in the editor or turn off “smart quotes” under Settings… → Corrections.

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Thanks! I need the smart quotes for the rest of the project. I’ll just have to be tidy about edits then.

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4

You could also perform a search =“ replace =" later, it’s less walking on eggshells while editing and less hunting (and potentially missing some).

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For anyone writing interleaved HTML and prose, or for example writing a technical book about programming, with copious code samples, I recommend throwing a keyboard shortcut on the Edit ▸ Substitutions ▸ Smart Quotes command (and maybe the dashes one too, as you don’t want <!— Oops! —> to end up in your readable text!).

For spot fixes, probably the most efficient way is:

  1. The shortcut for Edit ▸ Select ▸ Select Style Range, since such snippets are bound to be in a raw markup pass-thru style.

    Or, probably even more efficiently if you’re copyproofing everything, Edit ▸ Find ▸ Find by Formatting with the search mode set to look for this style in particular, which will jump from hit to hit with the result already selected.

  2. Edit ▸ Transformations ▸ Convert Quotes to Straight Quotes, which works upon selections if one is provided.

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