I am using LO Writer for Mac, most recent update. I have a manuscript, broken down into individual chapters (one to a file) that was imported from Word. The text uses typewriter quotes; I want to change all of them to curly quotes. The preferences and quotes choice are set up, but–there’s always that damn but. When I do a select all highlight and use auto correct, it changes the quotes properly, but also changes the spacing from double to single and replaces the three asterisks I used to delineate a break in the narrative, to a two black bars, a thin one on top and broader one beneath it, like a border, that runs from margin to margin. I can’t delete this and get the astericks back. Any ideas or help on this problem. If not solved, I’ll have to go back and manually change quotes. There may be some way to this with Styles or a Template, but I’ve never figured those things out despite considerable effort. Thanks in advance.
Using autocorrect requires that the autocorrect be setup correctly for your usage. In your case, apparently it is not. You might want to inspect it thoroughly and change/remove those settings that contradict your style.
But for this task, I’d say, simple Find and Replace is more suited - look for "([^\s]) - i.e. a quote just before non-space character, and replace with “$1 (using reqular expressions); then look for " left and replace with ”. Of course, there are other regexes possible.
Try OOoFBTools. That extension has a lot of built-in features for batch formatting of texts, including quotation marks handling.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll give them a try.