I have used Scrivener for twenty years, and can’t imagine writing serious stuff in any other app. But I have ONE problem. I write in more than one language. English uses quotation marks (“…” aka inverted commas). A number of European languages use guillemets (« … »). I can’t find any way of writing with guillemets in Scrivener. My Mac’s keyboard offers a kind of shortcut, but it is cumbersome. – Would it be possible for the Scrivener crew to add an option on the transformation menu? We can choose to transform from straight to curly quotes. It would be so great to be able to tick the box for transform from quotes to guillemets! – Has anyone else solved this problem???
A workaround would be to export the text, change the characters, and then reimport to scrivener. But this doesn’t work, at least not with Word (which I only use when I must, to finalize things with publishers) Word now offers guillemets if I set the whole text to the relevant language. BUT Word still can’t replace quotation marks with guillemets or vice versa, in a simple find and replace operation. – Is there any word processor out there that can distinguish between the two for replacement purposes?
I wish the powers that be at Scrivener could solve this…
Also, suavito, thank you for that link. very interesting. I will experiment a bit with Nisus writer pro.
It is possible to change quotation marks in Mac settings/keyboard. See screenshot. there are options for guillemets with spaces (French style) or without spaces (Scandinavian languages). It’s just that for anyone who switches between languages all day, this is HIGHLY inconvenient! If I were settling down to hours of writing in one language, that is one option.
also, in some keyboard settings (I mean language options) one can get guillemets by pressing option Shift v and option Shift b. but that doesn’t work from an Anglophone keyboard setting.
At compile time, you could have the compiler replace the quote marks with guillemets.
With a third party keyboard macro app like Keyboard Maestro, you could quickly institute the two keyboard shortcuts you mention, then you could just type the guillemets where you need them.
Or without using third party software, you could do the same by setting up a custom keyboard mapping on your Mac — with which you could institute those same two character shortcuts. The key map file on your Mac is what assigns the keys of the keyboard to the characters they should produce. You could simply copy and modify the file to tweak what shift-option-v and shift-option-b do.
Thank you!! – I will look into Keyboard Maestro, which I have never tried. The compile route is of course possible. It’s just that punctuation with guillemets is different from punctuation with quotation marks. Commas and full stops go outside, not inside etc. And for some reason I find it so hard to stare at all tht wrongness as I work on a manuscript! – the key is to have some system that can switch from one language to another by a keystroke or two. – thank you again!
If you do try Keyboard Maestro, here’s a macro I wrote to change from various double quote options (straight, smart, guillemets). It looks at the selected text to see what’s being used and replaces that with whatever you tell it.
I snipped it from my palette of text tools so it doesn’t come with a hot key (pick your own) and it could but doesn’t check for a text selection (so make sure you select some text for it to work on).
