Does anyone know how I can get Tinderbox to automatically recognize certain quotation marks and apostrophes again? I’ve searched everywhere, even in the Mac’s Settings, but I can’t find anything. I’d like it to recognize the following signs: ’ and « » instead of " ". Thanks!
I’m not sure but it might involve setting locale in either both the document and.or the macOS.
In what context do you want them recognized?
In the action language, you’re stuck with ' and ". This is barbaric, but I believe it’s a nearly universal custom in programming languages.
But if we’re talking about text substitution, there’s a host of System Settings.
In my notes window, as shown below, I only get the second format, whereas I would like the first one to automatically switch to the second without having to use any keyboard shortcuts. I don’t see anything in System Settings, nor in Tbx settings, and Mark Anderson’s suggestion doesn’t work for me either. Just a few days ago, the adjustment was done automatically.
At play here, I believe, is the issue of smart quotes. In styled text it seems a generally held notion that typographic, a.k.a ‘curly’ quotes are better such that when I type this"hello" I get “hello”. Note how I had to use code block styling here as the Discourse forum software changes the typed straight double quotes to curly ones: wrong in the first case but doing the desired transform in the second case.
In Tinderbox, this transformation is controlled (in a persistent setting) via $SmartQuotes at note level and a document level preference. When set to false this stops styled text inputs like the $Text area automatically changing straight quotes to curly ones, leaving all quotes in the form as typed.
A further wrinkle is that when smart quotes are allowed, pasted=in blocks of text are not always parsed fully for expected substitutions.
There is no reverse-smart mode I’m aware of, whereby quotes input in the curly form—or here French language guillemets (« texte ») equivalent of English’s double quotes (“text”)—are coerced automatically to their ‘straight’ form, i.e. " (again in code form due to forum s.w).
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