global replacement of straight quotes to curly quotes

Telerover · February 18, 2020, 2:31am

I’m writing my first book, and I set the style for curly quotes on each side of dialogue.

“You knew?” asked, Sam.

The above uses character decimal 8220 Left double quotation marks and Decimal 8221 Right double quotation marks to surround the dialogue. Somewhere, things got changed to straight quotes, which are decimal 34 quotation marks.

“You knew?” asked Sam.

and I want to globally update the quotes to curly on both sides of the dialogue. A find and replace changes all the straight quotes to the left curly quote, or the right curly quote, but not both. an update does not make the changes to force the entire document to the style I want. Help?

gabix · February 18, 2020, 6:27am

Read these guidelines and ask a good question. In particular, be precise about the characters that you describe as curly quotes.

Telerover · February 18, 2020, 5:26pm

“You knew?” asked, Sam. Uses decimal 8220 Left double quotation marks and Decimal 8221 Right double quotation marks to surround the dialogue.

“You knew?” asked, Sam.

petermau · February 19, 2020, 12:21pm

This might help for new text.

Have you set the Localised option for Quotation Marks?
TOOLS > AUTOCORRECT > AUTOCORRRECT OPTIONS > LOCALISED OPTIONS. then set the SINGLE and DOUBLE QUOTES.
The settings for quotations are Country and Publisher specific.

gabix · February 19, 2020, 9:46am

A workaround to try:

Install OOoFBTools.
In the menu, choose Correct formatting → Hyphens, dashes, graphics etc. → Replace quotation marks " " and “ ” with « ».
Then replace « with “ and » with ”.

P. S. There might be a simpler solution.