Okay, this is driving me bananas. I usually write in straight HTML or Markdown and then copy-paste out of the Scrivener editor into web interfaces that support entries in one or the other format, and skip the Compile process entirely, but I’m working on a project for which I would like to actually use the Markdown compile—but the MultiMarkdown Compile to HTML forces smart quotes, as in, it’s inserting them as HTML decimal entities (e.g. ’), despite the fact that I have smart quotes disabled in the edit menu, disabled in preferences, and I’m 100% sure I’m typing in straight quotes. 100%. Sure. I have them disabled on the system level, and I even did a find-replace to check.
Even if I make a duplicate Compile format so I can check the “straighten smart quotes” option in the Markdown Compile Settings, it’s still forcing smart quotes into the HTML as hard-coded HTML decimal entities, which—in addition to being a massive and unnecessary headache from an editing/accessibility perspective (my vision isn’t good, so I can almost never tell if they’re curling the correct way)—are not supported on the platforms I’m going to be pasting this work into. Right now I am then running my compiled document through a Python script to re-replace all my quotes with dumb quotes, but that’s incredibly annoying, and also just super unnecessary.
Where on earth is this behavior introduced? I even checked my compile.xml file, but if it’s set somewhere in there it’s not obvious.
I have no idea what the BB will do to the text copy-pasted out of Scrivener, but let’s give it a shot; here’s my text, I am 100% sure that on my computer all of the quotes are dumb/straight quotes.
And here’s what I get when I…
- Compile to txt (dumb quotes): Tester-html.txt (1.18 KB)
- Compile to HTML (smart quotes, as HTML decimal entities—note that I trimmed away most of the header/footer HTML so the bulletin board will let me upload it): Tester-txt.txt (1.06 KB)
