This is a pretty straightforward bug: the find dialog doesn’t check for smartened quotations marks, apostrophes, and the like when searching.
I’m not sure if this is new for 1.51 or not, but I’ve certainly never experienced this bug before. then again, I can’t say I spend a lot of time searching for words with apostrophes in them.
To reproduce: make sure typographer’s quotes are enabled. Type a possessive, e.g. “Brian’s.” Then, invoke the CMD-F search box and type in Brian’s by hand (don’t copy and paste). The apostrophe will be unsmartened, and it won’t find the word you just typed.
This isn’t a bug exactly - it’s just that if you type “brian’s” with a straight apostrophe, then of course it won’t be able to find the word if it has a curly apostrophe as it looks for an exact match. It has always been like this. However, I will look into refining it for 2.0, as it would be better if it was more loose about apostrophes (I just checked Word and Pages and see that they are more loose about this sort of thing).
Best,
Keith
I found this a minor annoyance as well when I was trying to search for all instances of “it’s” to make sure I had the correct form (typographer’s quotes turned on). I eventually worked out I could either find an instance of it in my doc and copy & paste it into the search field (or type it somewhere in my doc temporarily and copy) - not really convenient. But I can see it’s the same behaviour in TextEdit and in NeoOffice with their alternate quotes. I’d prefer to use the typographer’s quotes, but might just have to use the straightened ones so searching is easier. It’d be great if 2.0 could find either the straightened or typographer’s quotes!