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Smarten straight quotes in Pages 1.0 Apps
If you've imported or pasted text into Pages, and want to smarten up your quotes (convert straight quotes to curly quotes), just hit Command-F to bring up the Find and Replace dialog. Put a double-quote in both the Find and Replace fields, hit Replace All, and it's done! Repeat the same process with straight single quotes in the Find and Replace dialog, and it will smarten them, too.

The only case I've noticed where it gets it wrong is when you have a quote (either single or double) immediately following a dash (endash or emdash), or after a hyphen. But those cases tend to be rare. Note: be sure "Use smart quotes" is checked in Preferences or this won't work.

[robg adds: I often have to go the other way, converting curly quotes into straight quotes. If you disable the smart quotes option in Preferences, you can then just reverse these directions -- copy and paste a smart single- or double-quote into the Find box, and then just type a single- or double-quote in the Replace box. You only have to copy one of the double-quotes; even though they look different, all will be replaced when you choose Replace All.]
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Smarten straight quotes in Pages 1.0
Authored by: PancakeMan on Mar 09, '05 12:00:18PM

This has long been my method for accomplishing the same thing in MS Word. I would guess that, like with Word, the reverse process that robg describes would work just by typing the quotation mark in the find and replace boxes (rather than going to the trouble of pasting a curly one into Find), but I don't have Pages to test this.



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Smarten straight quotes in Pages 1.0
Authored by: rammjet on Mar 09, '05 12:17:55PM

WordServices (scroll down near bottom) adds a "Convert" item to the Services menu that permits converting between "Straight" and "Smart" quotes (among many other things).

This may or may not work in Pages, I have not tried it.

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Smarten straight quotes in Pages 1.0
Authored by: blubbernaut on Mar 09, '05 06:07:16PM

It has to be said that straight quotes are not really quotation marks at all, but merely feet and inches marks. The only reason they get used as such is that they couldn't fit all characters on early typewriters.



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Smarten straight quotes in Pages 1.0
Authored by: PancakeMan on Mar 14, '05 05:29:25PM

or even more technically, they are prime and double-prime marks...



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