Smart quotes are not being very smart anymore

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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I’ve been using smart quotes forever. Scrivener has always been reliable in changing straight quotes to smart quotes, in the rare moments when that’s needed.

Apparently not anymore.

I fleshed out a scene just now that I’d written, in Scrivener, a couple years ago, and this included some new dialogue. I noticed that the quotes were straight quotes rather than smart quotes, so I went to Transformations to fix that.

It didn’t.

It would change smart quotes to straight quotes, but not straight quotes to smart quotes.

So I re-launched the Finder. No help. I quit and restarted Scrivener. Still no help.
I shut the computer down, then restarted it. Still nothing. I made sure that I had ‘Smart quotes’ checked under ‘Substitutions’. I created a blank document, put one word in it in quotes. Transformations will not change them to smart quotes.

No other application is running, and I have not added any new applications to this computer in a very long time. So I think I’ve exhausted all options on my end.

They can only be one of two answers: I am either doing something wrong, or Scrivener has developed a new bug.

This is a significant change from the way things used to be. I’m not considering this a minor problem. Consistency is absolutely necessary when writing novels, or formatting the structure.

M3 MBP, v15.5, Scrivener v3.4

Little help?

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Third (and most likely) answer: Mac OS changed the underlying code.

The current version of Sequoia is 15.6.1. Wouldn’t hurt to update and see if that fixes it.

Another possibility is that you changed fonts, and the new font doesn’t include the “smart” glyphs.

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It works fine for me, in 15.6 (haven’t applied the minor fix yet), by the way. I would also say we never got any widespread reports of this breaking while 15.5 was the latest, and we mostly certainly would have.

Otherwise, if you search the forum in the macOS section, you will find this, along with spell check, are notoriously fickle (often more so in Page View, where the complexity of the text editor is greater). These problems go back ages, maybe even back to Mac OS X 10.8 or even .7. It feels like it’s been a problem since forever, and we’ve done just about all we can to stay out of Apple’s way when it invokes these features in the text editor, without essentially deleting everything Scrivener can do that TextEdit cannot, I suppose, but who wants that?

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Same OS, same Scriv vers. I can’t replicate the problem.