If I end a sentence with space ellipsis space " … " and then a quotation mark, I get the LEFT curly quote. Is there a simple way to the correct one?
Bobby
(quirky since before you were born)
This is a general problem with most smart punctuation systems, including the built-in OS X system that Scrivener uses. I usually get around it by typing something after the ellipses (or after an em-dash or whatever), usually a “d” for no particular reason, then typing the quote, then deleting the “d”. I’ve been doing this for so many years now, even since I first used MS Word, that I no longer even notice. (I note that Word is better with ellipses, though; it’s just dashes that get Word.)
And I thought you were gruff since forever, not quirky since before we were born?
Forever IS before you were born, or so I assume … and both would be synonymous from your POV … but never mind.
I have been playing a similar trick, typing the right quote BEFORE backing up and inserting space ellipsis space. (I think that’s the grammatically accepted sequence.)
Bobby
Turn off auto-substitution of three .'s for an ellipsis and then use the Substitutions tab of the Compile dialogue to put in ellipses wherever it encounters three periods.
[size=50]Damned kids these days and their auto-co-rectification…[/size]
Or just type Opt-Shift-[ directly and bypass all of the dancing about with arrow keys and spaces and so on?
But that’s a single quote, which is not the way we punctuate dialog.
And where the heck is that documented? If I could find that, I might also find the double quotes I want.
Bobby
You could set up a new substitution for this in the substitutions pane, so that …" gets replaced with …“ or set up a replacement in compile if you only need this come compile time.
The Opt-Shift-[ shortcut is a Mac shortcut, so it’s not documented in Scrivener. Opt-(Shift)-] is single quote on US keyboards at least; Opt-(Shift)-[ is double.
I’m pretty sure that’s what I said… I certainly didn’t suggest typing the right quote after backing up. My habit is typing: “blah…d” Then hit back arrow and delete the “d”. Ioa’s solution is a better one, though. (And it’s not a single-quote, at least not on most keyboards - that should be a double curly quote. It’s just part of OS X’s shortcuts, so nothing to do with Scriv.)
How could anything be synonymous at a time when I had no POV? 
On my keyboard the Opt-[ and Shift-Opt-[ keys print “ and ” respectively. Single quote uses ] as the base key. I’m not sure if Apple documents all of the Option key characters in a help file anywhere (probably not, since I bet each region/language keyboard is slightly different), but in the Keyboard system preference panel, there is an option to “Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar”. Turn that on, and you’ll get a floating keyboard display that highlights as you type. Hold down Option, and Option-Shift to see all of the possible characters that can be directly input without the special characters palette.
I was using ] where AmberV said [ . Sorry for the confusion.
And yes, the keyboard viewer documents it. After a fashion.
Bobby
Actually, I’d prefer a keystroke that enters < … ”> all at once.
For years, I used a macro for that in Word.
Bobby
Is it possible to set that up using the “Text” pane in the “Languages and Text” system preferences?
If not, sounds like you might give TextExpander or Typinator or one of those a whirl, though you have to pay for them. But then you can set them up to do many more such things for you.
Mark
Yes, actually … I think. I can use the character viewer to insert a single-character ellipsis and right curly quotes into the target string. I hesitate to choose a triggering key sequence, however, with no idea what keystrokes are already ‘taken’. There are many sources for these key combinations, but no comprehensive listing that I can find. Perhaps that doesn’t particularly matter, but I wonder.
Bobby
I often think that developers ought to be made to publish a list of the hot keys used by their programs in a standard format so that we could track key clashes. I’ve begun making myself a spreadsheet with some of the ones that have interfered with my working, but it would be a massive task to log all of them. Perhaps it is time a co-operative initiative was started. In the meantime, one can use Dashkards:
Not complete, but it’s a help. Using the Control key used to be a safe way of making sure that you didn’t get a clash, but that is being used more and more by programmers because we are running out of hot keys and have so many utilities running in the background.
Another way around the problem is to use Keyboard Maestro to intercept the hot keys and present you with a little menu so you can choose which one you were intending.
Keyboard Maestro is pretty remarkable, though a touch expensive.
Cheers, Martin.
Single character elipsis is Option-Shift-: (i.e) colon. But in the language and text pane, if you look, all the keys are just straight alpha-numeric, punctuation/parenthesis/slash characters, so if you used a similar string for your input side, say dot-dot-dot-double-quote and on the output have elipsis-closing curly quote … would that not work? I’ve not tried, so I don’t know, but …
Mark
A good trick for the Mac is: Ctrl-Anything is a pretty safe “user set”; it’s very rare for a Mac program to use them and they aren’t really used at the system level either. There are a few EMACS style shortcuts that use Control, such as Ctrl-E to jump to the end of a paragraph (same as Opt-DownArrow, but without the hand jump to get to the arrows). It doesn’t hurt though, to override these if you never use them, and there aren’t that many of them.
That doesn’t really have any relevance to substitution, as far as I know, but since we’re on the topic of avoiding clashes. 
This is getting a bit complicated, what with discussions of whether Keith pre-dates the Big Bang and all (opinions differ on this), so I hesitate to suggest something, but…
For the original problem of the inappropriately curlying quote, can’t you just type cmd-z (Undo), right arrow? This simply redoes the auto-correction and highlights the character (hence the need for the right arrow).
This works for all auto-corrections – the same trick works in Word as well (Mac and Windows versions), as far as I remember.
No. That doesn’t appear to work.
Mac OS allows me to enter all that, but the substitution doesn’t occur.
Possibly it would, if I turned off Scrivener’s automatic substitutions.
Bobby
OK, I chose to use “fq” as the trigger for space ellipsis space right-curly – and that works.
Thanks for all the ideas, everybody.
Bobby
Also qq for space em-dash space right-curly.
Bobby