Smart quotes do not work properly when they are immediately after a punctuation mark, such as a dash or an open parens. They appear as right-hand (closing) quotation marks, instead of left-hand (opening) marks. It seems as though the code designating which mark to use is simply checking to see if the former character is a space or not. It should look for spaces, dashes, and open parens, brackets, or braces.
Still true!
Thanks, I have added this to our bug tracking system and hope to have it fixed in the next update.
In the latest build (RC11) it’s mostly fixed; however, I just noticed it still breaks for em-dashes and ellipses.
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Not sure that is a bug. A lot of dialogue ends with those two forms of punctuation, I’d want the current function.
It most certainly is a bug, and a rather serious one at that. It amazes me that after all this time, it has still not been fixed. I have authored dozens of highly-technical academic (scholarly) books, and this bug—failing to handle “smart” quotes properly following a variety of characters, not just ellipses or en or em dashes or minus signs—has been a complete bane and pain. Every form of preceding 'bracket" should be handled as well, not just “[”, “{”, “(” and the like, but also “<”, etc.
After looking at this feature further we decided to follow Ms Word opening smart quote only after the following cases: start of a line, after a space, (, [, {, -, EnDash, and EmDash. Ms Word does NOT use opening smart quote after Ellipsis and ‘<’. If we have missed a symbol which precedes an opening smart quote in MS Word, please let us know. If MS Word does not use opening smart quote after this symbol, we will not add it, Thanks.