I have selected Times New Roman as my default font. Serif, with curly quotes. My draft came out with curly quotes, except certain single quotes, which came out straight, as in the sample. Why?
Don’t know for sure why the quotes are inconsistent. If you apply…
Format > Convert > Quotes to Smart Quotes
…do the single straight primes change to single curly quotes?
Have you checked the individual Smart Quote settings for both double and single quotes in OS X System Preferences > Language & Text:
[attachment=0]smartquoteprefs.png[/attachment]
Thank you. The inconsistency may be user error.
It looks as if the Mac preferences are the issue. My system looks different from yours … I found the smart quotes in Preferences/keyboard, but “smart quotes” was not checked, and checking it seems to solve the problem.
As an aside, I found that I can correct the problem for double quotes in Word be doing a global replace of double quotes with … … double quotes.
THe problem for which there may be no easy solution is the single quote used in colloquial speech, such as 'em as a short form of “them.” Word processors, seeing a space preceding the single quote always make it an open quote, whereas publishers want the correct close quote. THere are a number of (pain in the butt) ways to solve this in the writing, but no global solutions I know of. If you happen to know …
Personally, I just type proper quotes in the first place, rather than typing primes and waiting for the smart quotes mechanism to convert them…