Quotation marks don't work in comments

[ShannonG]

I was working in a MSWord formatted document in LibreOffice Writer, and I apparently made some accidental keystrokes that changed how quotation marks work in the comments of those type of documents. Now, when I try to type an apostrophe (’) I get double quotes ("), and when I try to type double quotes (") I get little bracket-like things that look like chevrons.

It only behaves this way in a comment, and not in the document itself, but I have no idea what I did to make it happen, nor how to change it back. Ideas?

[ajlittoz]

You may have changed the language of the comment. Unfortunately, there is no status line/indicator to report the language in a comment. What you experience is a consequence of AutoCorrect options related to language specificities.

I didn’t find a specific setting for comments only. If your document is single-language, put the cursor anywhere and Tools>Language>For All Text>Reset to Default Language.

If your document is multi-lingual, tell me so in a comment below my answer.

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[ShannonG]

Thank you for your response.I received the document from a client, and while the document is in English, it appears the default language is set as Russian! Changing the language for the whole document to English does appear to fix the problem. However, by doing so, will I mess anything up for my client when they receive the updated version?

[ajlittoz]

If whole document is in English, it is harmless. If part of it is in Russian, spellchecker will flag every Russian word as an error. Apart from that, there is no adverse effect since spellchecking errors can be ignored.

Writing multi-lingual documents is not difficult, you just have to manage paragraph or character styles specified the language for the sequence. This will take care of the localised specificities such as typographic quotes and others.

If the answer fixes the problem, don’t forget to check it for community benefit.