I work parallel on different scrivener projects. Mostly in German (my native spoken language) and some in English. And I jump frequently between these languages.
How can I assign the correct english quotation marks without changing the system settings ( which seems for me a little bit weired)?
Isn’t there 'language setting for that specific english job?
It seems to me that, from this point of view one of the limitations imposed by the Mac system is that fundamentally language matters are handled by the System, not the individual apps. So, as far as I understand it, Scrivener doesn’t let you designate one project as being in Language A and another in Language B; nor does Scrivener let you mark a span of text as being in a given language.
This is not to say that it’s impossible; it is possible in Nisus Writer Pro for instance, built on the same Apple TextKit as Scrivener. But the difference is that the team at Nisus have produced a word processor in which they concentrate on all such aspects of the text system. While KB has made a number of important modifications to the TextKit, there are very many aspects of Scrivener which simply don’t exist in traditional word processing and which are not concerned with the text itself, and it is those aspects where much of the effort has gone.
The only thing I can suggest you try, is:
Opt-[ and Opt-Shift-[ give opening and closing English double typographer’s quotes, and Opt-] and Opt-Shift-] give opening and closing English single typographer’s quotes.Others may come up with different recommendations. Be aware that those key-combos are on an English/International keyboard; if you using a different keyboard you’ll have to find out what’s possible with yours.
Mark
ok, thats waht I was afraid of.
Atm my solution is search and replace the whole project for any opening quotation and replace it with an american “. same with the ending. And for security probably with a grep.
If it’s so predictable and you know that search and replace will always work without you having to check every one, couldn’t you could set up an automatic substitution in the compile format (optionally with regex), which will automate the process as much as possible?
just for information: under OSX on a german keyboard with German as standard language, its
⌥2 and ⇧⌥2 for the american quotations.
thats a good point !
Just for information and amusement: what are the differences between English and American quote marks?
Mark
’ versus " as I understand it.
Basically »…« vs. “…” (and ›…‹ / ‘…’, you get the idea). Mostly in print. In handwritten texts you’ll likely see „…“ (and ‚…‘) – both variants are correct. *
The beauty of guillemets (»…«) is that there’s not ambiguity, like the apostrophe and the single closing quotation mark (’) being the same character, so you can just brute force replace them to other systems. At least in one direction.
(Just don’t ask the Swiss.)
ADD: * Please don’t mix them in the same document, of course. 
have a look here:
It’s a classic. Native German and occasional English here too. And also looking for a good solution for quite a while.
I find ⌥2 and ⇧⌥2 for the English quotation marks very uncomfortable as the left hand has to be moved to far from the normal ten finger touch typing position.
@brookter’s solution to leave the replacement to Compile is the most comfortable one for typing—but it keeps you looking at wrong quotation marks while writing. Doesn’t make me happy.
I have a licence for TextSoap, an advanced tool for replacing text. It allows to replace all four quotation marks in one step. But—huge but—TextSoap corrupts Scrivener footnotes! Due to the fact that Apple has not implemented footnotes in RTF (just in the both proprietary and long abandoned RTFD), and TextSoap uses the Clipboard with Rich Text.
I extensively use Typinator for text replacement on the fly. It supports RegEx. But—again—it is not that simple: Of course I don’t type » etc. but ", and macOS does the rest. So one would at first have to switch off the typographical correct quotation marks and then find the proper RegEx to do its job. Admittedly, because I have been writing long(er) form texts in English less and less I was too lazy to even try.
For short stuff I use Drafts. I use its action (JavaScript) made for paired glyphs like brackets for quotation marks. It works quite well, at least as long the quote does not expand over more than a paragraph: It simply searches backwards to the beginning of a paragraph, and if it does find an opening quotation mark it inserts a closing one. If not, an opening one.
I mentioned this because maybe Keyboard Maestro which I don’t use can provide that too.
It would be great if it was possible to set a macOS Shortcut to switch the quotation settings, but without switching the complete keyboard layout. Well, Apple?
Good point. I use as text editor often BBedit, because its fully support grep.
Yes. My understanding is American uses “ ” for speech and ‘ ’ for scare-quotes, where English uses the opposite.
Also, American always puts the closing quotes after any period/comma willy-nilly, including scare-quotes, which to me is totally illogical. For me, the punctuation only precedes the quote mark in English if the punctuation is an element of speech-rendering; closing-scare-quotes always precede any sentence punctuation.
For a short while during my time in China, I wrote a column for China Daily. I had problems with that because their “polishers” on that column/page were American. The only solution for me (even though when the editor canvassed all their foreign staff and it ended up with 50% US vs 50% UK, but they still insisted on US style) was to make sure I didn’t have any words in scare-quotes butting up against sentence punctuation!
Mark
Except for semicolons… I had a lovely chat with Benjamin Dreyer about the absurdity (imo) of the USican quotes punctuation thing, and he politely agreed on certain points. He’s a lovely fellah. I highly recommend his book, Dreyer’s English, which generally gives both sides of the story, and he merrily sits on the fence – because after all, what does it really matter?
Now, em-dashes… Work of the Devil.
That was a go-to source of information for me when I lived in Shanghai and then Guangzhou in 1993 to 1996. I remember reading a very interesting story in there about a New Zealander (as I was) Rewi Alley-who moved to northern China in the 1920s and worked in the agricultural sector (https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4a10/alley-rewi).
A bit off topic sorry.
