All, I like having my quotation marks be smartened up everywhere, but I detest having two or three hyphens being turned into en or em dashes. (I type those directly when I want them.)
The Keyboard preferences have only a single toggle for “Use smart quotes and dashes”
Does anybody know if there’s some way to get macOS to smarten up only my quotation marks and leave my dashes alone?
Turn off the pre-set in Keyboard Preferences and hand-enter the charcter swaps you want in /Keyboard/Text
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. The rules about when a single or double quote should be an open or close quote are more complex than simple substitution.
(And the reverse doesn’t work either. I can’t just have all en and em dashes replaced with two or three hyphens, since I do use those characters.)
The automated setting doesn’t work well either; it routinely messes up curly quotes with leading or trailing em-dashes, for instance. I keep the automated settings for both kinds of dashes, and curly quotation marks, off, and type them by hand.
Let me just say that I’m really happy to see others caring about dashes and quotes. My team can’t even use punctuation or spaces correctly…
Thank you so much!
what are the keyboard items for right and left single and double curly quotes?
(I know dashes are option-hyphen and option-shift-hypen)
“ option + [
” option + shift + [
‘ option + ]
’ option + shift + ]
Old-timer, here. 7-bit ASCII, ya know? I keep life simple and use straight quotes everywhere.
Dr. McCoy: Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a typesetter!
