French smart quotes not supported?

[MatthiusD]

Hello there,

I am a french amateur writer and I love this software. However, I have come across a little (but very, very annoying) problem: I can’t find a way to write french dialogues.

Here is how the software works: if I write “Hello, my name is Matt”, it dynamically changes the apostrophes into «Hello, my name is Matt».
The problem is that in french (maybe in other languages too), it should be: « Hello, my name is Matt ».
Notice the space before and after the apostrophes.

I didn’t find a proper way to do so, because when I use the smart quotes thingy with spaces, it does this : « Hello, my name is Matt «.
It is like it does not recognize there is a quote before to ‘close’ this one when there is a space.
I found a very ugly workaround with substitutions but there is a little ‘bug’ there that I won’t mention here (not the subject).

So… Did I miss something? A little option to make it work with spaces? Or is this worth creating a bug report?

Thanks in advance!

[Maritimer]

Here is a solution, but it has a little bug.

First, type something with French quotes. Use Ctrl C to copy the opening quote.

Press F12 to go to options. Go to Corrections. Go to edit Substitutions.

Click + to start a new Substitution.

Use Ctrl V to put the opening quote in the first panel

Use Ctrl V in the second panel and add a space.

Click OK. In the next window click Apply . Click on OK.

Now type your French quoted test and you’ll see that a space has been inserted after the opening quote.

Do the same thing for the closing quote with the space before the quote in the second panel. When you type the closing quote nothing seems to happen until you type another space or character or return. That’s the little bug. Now the space will be applied before the end quote.

Eric

[MatthiusD]

Thanks for your answer, but that’s exactly the workaround I tried and talked aboout in my post. I said there was a little bug on the workaround and that’s the one.
The little bug is annoying too.

Do you think I can feel in a bug report to the dev team, or do they read this forum?

[Briar_Kit]

@MatthiusD

Thanks for your answer, but that’s exactly the workaround I tried and talked aboout in my post. I said there was a little bug on the workaround and that’s the one.
The little bug is annoying too.

Do you think I can feel in a bug report to the dev team, or do they read this forum?

Bonjour

On the list already, apparently.

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[Maritimer]

Hi Matthius,

It’s not really a bug because the substitution cannot be made until the analyser has determined that the characters are in the substitution list. For example, I use DD for Doyle, DDD for Doyle’s mom, and DDDD for Doyle’s dad. This is an extreme example, but obviously, you wouldn’t want DDDD to become DoyleDoyle or Doyle’s momD. No doubt some complicated programming could resolve this, but waiting until all cases have been eliminated is the surest way to get the correct substitution.

Unless the final character of your document is ‘»’, it will always be substituted with ’ »’. In that case, just type anything after the final ‘»’ and hit Back to erase it.

Eric