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Abacus · #1 (**permalink**) 04-28-2005, 05:37 AM

Hi all,

I was wondering if there was anything out there that would convert all feet and inches marks into curly quotes. I receive quite a bit of text for articles via email, and they always paste into Xpress with feet and inches marks. I then have to manually change them into Smart Quotes.

Thanks.

Trinity · #2 (**permalink**) 04-28-2005, 05:44 AM

Are your quotes set to Smart Quotes in the preferences?

Abacus · #3 (**permalink**) 04-28-2005, 05:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trinity

Are your quotes set to Smart Quotes in the preferences?

Yes. If I type anything I get the curly quotes. But text that has came from emails pastes in as feet and inches marks.

I also notice that they appear as feet and inches when creating a new email message, so maybe most applications out there default to feet and inches for their quote marks. In fact even here they're feet and inches " '. I might just disable Smart Quotes in case I end up with documents where there is a mixture of quote styles.

I would have thought the default would have been the other way around, as I would assume most people rarely use the feet and inches marks anymore, in Europe anyway.

Thanks.

T-Rex · #4 (**permalink**) 04-29-2005, 03:52 PM

You can seek out all straight quotes and replace them with the true quotes by using the Find/Change in QuarkXPress.

Select one of the straight quotes and copy it.
Open the Find/Change and paste it into the "Find" field.
Tab into the "Change" field and enter the true quote keyboard equivalent (Option/Shift-Option & right or left bracket)
Hold down the Option key to get "Find First" and click it. Continue from there with change/find next as needed. You will mentally need to keep track of which straight quotes are left/right and alternate, because your keyboard equivalents will be either left or right (open/closed).

When the text comes in and Smart Quotes didn't seem to work or the text already came that way, this will beat doing it one at a time.

Another idea may be to save your emailed text out in TextEdit as .txt and Get text via QuarkXPress. That will enable the Smart Quotes pref to convert them. Copy and pasting text will bypass that.