Scrivener - Preferences, Corrections, Substitutions
-> turn on Use Smart Quotes
Mac OS X System Preferences - Keyboard, Text:
-> Delete any old attempts
-> Add a new item to turn -" into —”
I.E. short dash dumb quote into long dash close smart quote. This worked with the smart quotes option here on and off.
Now when you type one short dash and then one dumb quote you will get the long dash close smart quote you are looking for.
Replacement during compile would presumably work, but I agree it’s good to see something that looks right while working on the text, rather than something that looks wrong until compiled.
Unfortunately, after doing that, when I typed -" Scrivener changed it the quote to a smart quote, facing the wrong way (again) and completely ignored any system settings made to the OS. That’s been the problem from the get go. Scrivener doesn’t change any of the autocorrects of OS X for me at all.
Yosemite and latest Scrivener here as well. I haven’t tried replacing during compile yet as I’m not ready to compile, but it’s something I plan to try. I can get the replacements to work in non-Scrivener programs with the OS X autocorrects, but Scrivener is stubborn and refuses.
I opened the OS X Keyboard prefs, Scrivener prefs, OS X Notepad and Scrivener document and tried all the combinations until it worked. If Scrivener isn’t obeying the OS X keyboard replacements, I wonder if there’s a preference file somewhere that needs to be deleted.
Hello. I have been fretting about this same issue (after compiling, my em dash quote mark situation seemed FUBAR… always curling the wrong way.) Drove me crazy and I kept fixing them individually.
But then I found a workaround and am sharing it in case it’s helpful to the OP and to others.
Here’s what I do:
In Scrivener Compile > Transformations > Check “Straighten Smart Quotes”
In MS Word (which I use to print and share my manuscript), Edit > Find > Advanced Find & Replace > enter a quotation mark (") alone in find (it’s okay if it looks straight or curly, doesn’t seem to matter, and then another quotation mark (") in the replace field > Replace All
I couldn’t believe when it automatically solved all the qte marks, making them curl the right way… even after em dashes!
Hope that’s useful. I wrote it all out for myself and pinned it to the bulletin board above my desk. I know it’s not a super and total fix, but I’m just happy to have a workaround at this point.
That works some of the time, but I still found places that it didn’t correct. Word’s find & replace feature is a bit buggy. It doesn’t always replace 100% of the instances you search for, especially in documents that are 400+ pages. Use it with care.
In dialogue, it is common to end a spoken line that is interrupted by typing an em dash. It is also damned common to place an ending quote mark directly after the em dash.
Yet every time I do this, the curly quote mark is facing forward rather than backward. Not at all what we had in mind.
I have to type a letter, then the quote mark, then remove the letter.
(this is American English, so double quote marks are used)
This seems like a problem that should be, and could be fixed. Certainly annoying that the app thinks it’s smarter than it actually is.
Thanks. ‘Shift > Option [’ is easier than having to type a letter and then go back and remove it.
Whether it is Apple or Scrivener in control of this (and I imagined all along it was Apple), doesn’t it seem odd that they would do it this way? I can’t imagine ever using an em dash followed directly by a right-facing quote mark. That makes very little syntactical sense. Any right-facing quote mark is always preceded by a space.
Well, you might occasionally have dialogue introduced (or interrupted by) em dashes; I’ve seen that in books, albeit perhaps older ones. But if you never need an em dash followed by an open double quote, or would need it so infrequently that you’d rather just deal with correcting it in editing after compile, you can set up a replacement in compile so that all instances of —“ are replaced with —” in the output document.
Hey, on my mac, scrivener places the opening smart quote the wrong way, that is, open to the left, when it should be open to the right. It’s not a mac issue, because on other programs, such as open office, it works just fine.
I usually attribute this to accidental spaces or edits I’ve made near the quotes, and the character replacement didn’t catch it. I now perform these steps periodically:
convert smart quotes to straight quotes
replace multiple spaces with single
project replace regular expression ^\s+ with nothing (zaps leading whitespace on lines)
project replace regular expression \s+$ with nothing (end-of-line whitespace)
replace straight quotes with smart (revert the first step)
As I move things around I tend to mess up the spacing, and do notice quotes going wrong. These steps, in order, fix them up.
It’s not a mac issue, because on other programs, such as open office, it works just fine.
It would be better to compare it to other native Mac software though, as OpenOffice has very little to do with Mac technology beyond maybe the main menu, and will have its own typography settings, and code for implementing them.
So check your system quote settings, which will impact all Mac software like Scrivener, in System Settings: Keyboard: Input Sources: Edit. Some regions legitimately use quotes that might look ”backward” to you, depending on what you are used to.
I found this solution on reddit: this. Basically, they said to
put a period after the em-dash/hyphen,
put the quotation mark at the end (it should be facing inward, meaning it’s closing the open quote
delete the period
That’s what’s been working for me! I just found that solution because I was just looking for the solution literally today, haha. I hope this helps you, Aki!
