I apologize if there is an answer to this somewhere else in this forum. But I recently upgraded to Scrivener 3.0 for Windows. And suddenly I can’t get em dashes and smart quotes to play nice together. I have a lot of dialog that ends: “What are you–” indicating that the speaker is abruptly interrupted. In the new version of the software the curly quote is backward. This was never a problem before. So is there a setting somewhere or do I have to stop using smart quotes?
If it’s the latter, then this is not exactly an improvement. I like the new version of Scrivener, but if it can’t make em dashes and curly quotes play nice, then that’s a big problem that needs to be fixed.
Hey, I figured out how to fix this. I wrote out instructions, but evidently I can’t post a link. But basically you have to go into options, corrections, edit substitutions, and then create a substitution that replaces the emdash and open smart quote with an em dash and a closed smart quote.
Yeah, you have to use the forum just a little bit in order to post links, as an anti-spam bot measure. What you can do in the meanwhile is bookmark your post with a one week reminder and add the link then, most likely.
This in particular is a common smart-quote problem it seems. It’s also on the Mac as well, system-wide. You’d think it wouldn’t be, since the em-dash to denote interruption or a pause in dialogue is fairly common.
Thank you for suggesting this workaround. I’ve just made the change and am happy to see it working. Still, I do hope they fix it. Not everyone will know this workaround, and a lot of backwards quotes are probably floating around out there.
I had this problem some time ago, and user ardenhag said that they just format the text as normal (without the em dash, and using the curly end/closing quote), and then add the em dash in to the text after that.
Not sure if this will work on windows, but on the Mac, shift > option > left bracket will type your end-quote character facing the proper direction after an em dash.