Hi there.
I believe there’s a bug in the latest Windows version. File>Options>Corrections>Punctuation>Use Smart Quotes. I have chosen «This is correct.» but the output is « This is wrong. ». Error is spacing. I’ve tested a couple of other quotation settings and they are displaying the correct output.
Actually, that is correct French typography, not a bug.
Sorry to answer bluntly: there are other countries than France in this world. In Switzerland (at least in the German speaking part) it’s wrong. And if the preview is indicating no spaces, why are there 2 spaces?
And I’ll be blunt too. Of course there are other French speaking countries apart from France. But the fact that whoever programmed the smart quote code has made it the French-France (and maybe many other countries) standard does not mean it’s a bug in Scrivener.
So many people come on this forum and label things as bugs, when they are nothing of the sort (they are following a different standard; it’s not what that person expects; the person is new to Scrivener and expects it to behave like Word) and the result is Scrivener gets a reputation for being full of bugs many of which are not bugs at all.
Scrivener, like all software, has bugs, but this is not one of them.
OK, I’ll give you that, it’s not a bug. But when I click a button with preview, I expect that outcome, and not an outcome that is valid somewhere on this earth. And by the way, I’m not a newcomer to Srivener - not at all, and I never used Word in my life. But then again, what has this to do with the problem at hand?
Yes, it is a bug because these spaces are not shown in the selector and the editor does generate them. In Spanish, such quotes (no spaces) are needed and this bug would make Scrivener unusable for me if I used the Windows version.
In addition, it doesn’t occur in the old Version 1.9 (Windows at least). So, it’s a regression.
Regards.
Thanks you, Vincent. That is enlightening.
If anyone is interested: the grammatical convention in French is to use a narrow non-breaking space for guillemets, !, ? and ; – and no space at all if the narrow non-breaking space is not available/possible.
Some people will in the latter use a full size (em-sized) non-breaking space, but technically (just technically, by the grammatical convention - it still works, nonetheless) it is the wrong way to go about it.
[EDIT] Out of curiosity, I did a quick research to compare Quebec and France.
What I detailed above is true for Quebec. And it is actually the opposite for France.
Quebec : narrowNBS or (if not avail.) no space at all.
France : narrowNBS or (if not avail.) em-sized NBS.
Thanks everybody and especially @Vincent_Vincent for the solution.
As a native French speaker and new Scrivener user (4 weeks now), I’ve already identified its limitations.
So what?
Indeed, when I imported my previous Word documents into Scrivener, I discovered a problem with the non-breaking space being too narrow for the quotation marks, !, ?, and ; –.
I solved the problem by using the search and replace function in the entire project for each quotation mark, !, ?, and ; –.
It took me 5 minutes… and it was done!
FYI, I had to translate/rename the tag names or statuses, as well as other elements of the novel template I’m using to write my three-books project.
No problem.
And for grammar and lexical checking, it’s easy to compile an excerpt from the project and send it to the appropriate software of your choice.
Again, no problem. Of course, with its complex interface and long list of features, the software can be difficult to use. Getting started ask for a learning curve, as for any software.
The compile and editing part of Scrivener is not easy as well; but after try/tweak trials, I start now to understand how it can work, for manuscript or epub, and the result is great.
My conclusion: this software is amazing and I wonder how I could not use it on the past ten years.
@P.BENAT
Good on you, mate.