Control Curly Quotes

Mon, Feb 16, 2009

QuarkXPress will automatically convert straight quotes to curly quotes as you type them, if you enable the Smart Quotes option in the Input Settings section of Preferences. (It’s on by default.)

If you want to type in some straight quotes, you can override this feature by simply holding down the Control key as you type the quotation mark or apostrophe.

The reverse is also true: if, for some reason, you prefer to type straight quotes, you can change that setting in Preferences. Then, if you want to type a curly quote, hold down the Control key as you type the quotation mark
or apostrophe.

One of the things I like about Quark’s handling of curly quotes is its sophistication: for example, it knows to use an apostrophe before a number, such as ’09, rather than an (incorrect) opening single quote.

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This post was written by:

Jay Nelson - who has written 864 posts on Planet Quark.

Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay has a monthly Fonts column in Macworld, writes for several other publications and speaks at industry events.

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One Response to “Control Curly Quotes”

max Says:
4. May 2010 at 2:49 pm

Jay, when I copy text from Word 2007 and paste it into QX 6.5 I get strait quotes, but in the Word doc you can visually see that they are curly, I have checked “smart Quotes” its driving me up the wall. Any thoughts?

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