Quotation Marks (and inch marks)

Does LibreOffice have a quotation mark? If so, where is it? My editor says I am using “inch marks” when I should be using quotation marks. Thank you for your help.

In my language your inch-Marks are automatically replaced during input (autocorrect). The settings depend on language, as french text will get guillements, german has the leading quotes at the bottom etc…
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And for where are they: All this are Unicode-characters. But usually it is easier to use the auto-correction mentioned above. Have you tried to type something like "Some text" ?
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See also:

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When asking here, always mention OS name, LO version and save format to get the most appropriate answers. In your case, you should also add your language name as the actual shape of quotation marks is highly culture-dependent, though typical installation takes care of your locale.

Serious: Choose your preferred settings under
>Tools>AutoCorrect>AutoCorrect Options...>>Localised Options


Not quite serious:

Your editor born before about 1878? (That year the USA joined the metre convention.)
BTW: Germany joined the convention officially in 1875, but legally introduced important metric units (though invented a 100 years before "by the enemy " in France conducted by the spirit of enlightenment) already on 1872-01-01.
Well, the historical situations were very different. But since there was some time…
Kidding: By what rules would your editor distinguish “inchages” from “mileages”? Are there also “footages”? “Fathomages”?

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I’m sure @Lupp knows that 5" represents inches and 5' likewise feet :slight_smile:

Wow! :dizzy_face:
I always would write 5 ft 5 in, but fortunately I never need. (You know: 1872-01-01 was long before Lupp-age. When I had first time to understand the “pound sign” used by fruit shops in the 1950es it was already more than 70 years that it was defined by -German- law to mean 500 g = 0.5 kg.)

For what it is worth:

  • The proper “inch mark” is the double prime character .
  • The character " is a quotation mark. It is commonly used to signify “inches” because the double prime character is usually not easily available from keyboard input, and they are sufficiently similar that you avoid misunderstandings.

I suspect that you did not use the double prime character :wink:

The apostrophe is also generally accepted as a quotation mark (used with “quotes within quotes”), although more frequently frowned upon, it seems. Similarly to the straight quote character, it is commonly used as a “feet” marker because it is readily available on your keyboard, unlike the single prime character which is the proper sign for “feet”.

In typography, proper quotes are preferably curly, or in some cases angled:

“…”
«…»


In general, the single/double/triple/quad prime characters signify first/second/third/fourth “reduction” (or “translation” or “projection”) in various contexts.

  • In imperial measurements, the first subdivision of the yard is a foot, the second is the inch.
  • In angle measurement, the first subdivision of the degree is the arcminute, the second is the arcsecond.
    Minutes and seconds of time are sometimes also specified using the prime characters.
  • In mathemathical function analysis, the simple derivatives may be specified by prime character.
  • In geometry, (x,y,z) coordinates after a transform operation are often shown as (x′,y′,z′)
  • In accounting/budgeting contexts, 5′ may denote 5000 and 5″ five million.

The " is still a quote character.

Straight quotes may look “cheap”, so for your editor’s peace of mind, replace them with «angled» or “curly” quotes anyway.

See also an article about typography and qoutation marks.

Edit: I noticed just now that straight quotes in postings in this place are autocorrected to curly quotes when they appear in a “quote context”.

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OT
It is only comparatively recently that down under came to its senses and adopted decimal currency in 1966 and measures in 1971

But this is awfully wrong (but what could you expect from non-educated press reporters?). In SI, base time unit is the second written as s (lowercase s). Minute is not a primary SI unit (since SI is decimal). Therefore there no internationally standardised abbreviation. It depends on national preferences, e.g. mn in FR, min in DE.

I once worked in a company dealing with flight management systems development. Since the goal is to provide software to create flight plans and the instructions to upload into the navigation computer of the plane, you must be very careful not to mix position (° ’ " within a datum) with time (h mn s within a time reference usually UTC, eventually written 00:00:00 though not standardised).

One of my engineers wrote a flight scenario where he stated “the plane flies 6’30"”. I summoned him to get explanation. He told me this was a flight time and I reminded him this looked like coordinates or distance (1’ = 1 nautical mile along a great circle). Such an erroneous use of units could cause casualties. I required a rewrite of the scenario with correct abbreviations.

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Thank you for this. I have always written 12ths of a French inch (lignes) incorrectly, I now have added ‴ to AutoCorrect. Time to go and change many documents.

@Shamanomaha1 could change his/her text by pasting to discourse then and copy back to the document, if curly quotes are what will please the editor.
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But actually I don’t like this “feature” here on the ask-site…

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People at ISO won’t be non-educated.
Well, that they need to accept the month (M) as a kind of thing similar somehow to something like an actual unit, we may need to accept. Even pope Gregory didn’t know remedy. But abbreviating the minute in the ISO duration context by the same upper-case letter isn’t forgivable.
That the name of the (imo) most precisely defined unit in physical sciences, the second (s), is also used for a time-ticker by UTC that also can last 2s willfully is one step higher on the ladder of sins.
I therefore decree: … …
Oops. You think I’m not entitled to decree anything?
It’s a pity.
And I didn’t regard that most “national” scipts may not know letter cases.

I haven’t noticed before the no quote context: ".


Quote context: “aa”.
Escaped as preformatted text (Ctrl+E, </> icon): "aa", seen in the edit window as the next line (but not with red color).

`"`aa`"`

Unicode:
U+2032 prime, feet, minutes
U+2033 double prime, inches, seconds
U+2034 triple prime
U+2057 quadruple prime
Source: Character Name Index

There are already solved questions on how to change straight quotes to typographic quotes. Effectively, there are two methods, AutoCorrect (which doesn’t work on styles other than Default Paragraph or Text Body), or Find & Replace.
You might find the below question interesting, read all answers and comments then Save A Copy as a backup in case of unwanted effects before trying the most likely, possibly How do I convert straight quotes to typographic quotes? - #7 by dajare.

How do I convert straight quotes to typographic quotes?