Searching quotation marks is inconsistant.

When I search for " It will only find open quotes, and not even all of them. For some reason, despite only working in a single font Times New Roman (win10pro64) it will skip over close quotes. Sometimes the quotations also look different. There are open quotes, close quotes, and straight agnostic quotes. While they are stylistically different I am not inputting different Ascii codes to choose between them, this decision is being made automatically by Libra Office. (I am not copy-pasting this document is entirely typed). This would be fine except for some reason searchability is ruined as some of the quotation marks must be copy-pasted into the search box. So if I am looking for a particular block of text or, in this case, searching the document for dialogue, it skips over large portions of the document where it decided to use different straight quotes, or whatever. This is very annoying. I have checked to make sure the entire document is a single font, but even so, a quotation mark, is a quotation mark, is a quotation mark. Style/font should not break search. Worst yet, find and replace does not fix the problem as it will automatically revert them all to what it feels is correct, OR it will replace say open quotes, with close quotes if I copy-paste the close quotes. I have no custom fonts, and no add-ons or plug-ins installed.

Delete the duplicates at 320233/searching-quotation-marks-is-inconsistant and 320234/searching-quotation-marks-is-inconsistant.

Posting several times doesn’t increase your chances to be answered. On the contrary, you create confusion about which occurrence to answer.

Searching is not to be blamed.

There are many convenience features in Writer to facilitate typing for beginners. Unfortunately, you are not warned that these features are enabled. Control is in Tools>AutoCorrect>AutoCorrect Options.

In your case, look in the Localized Options tab. In the bottom part of this dialog, you configure the replacement of straight quotes and double quotes (which are always present on keyboards) by typographical quotes. The latter have two shape variants: one for opening quotes, the other for closing quotes.

What AutoCorrect does is to replace the keyboard-typed code (U+0024 APOSTROPHE or U+0022 QUOTATION MARK) by locale-dependent user-chosen typographical quote. Consequently, the target character in the Search & Replace boxes is not the straight variant.

You say you have a variety of opening quotes (straight and typographical). This may come from the editing history of your document. It may have been typed under different version of Writer or even under a different application (M$ Word?) where the AutoCorrect configuration was different, resulting in the present mess.

Unfortunately, there is no automatic solution to fix everything in a consistent state. You must input the correct character to search for it. Or, if you know what a regular expression is and know how to use it, you can design a pattern which will hit all kinds of quotes and then make a single pass over your document.

To minimize the mess, be sure to save as .odt and not .doc(x).

To show the community your question has been answered, click the ✓ next to the correct answer, and “upvote” by clicking on the ^ arrow of any helpful answers. These are the mechanisms for communicating the quality of the Q&A on this site. Thanks!

In case you need clarification, edit your question (not an answer which is reserved for solutions) or comment the relevant answer.

I am using English (USA) and I am saving as .odt. However, You mentioned somehow, though I can not find it except through my email, that:

“Posting several times doesn’t increase your chances to be answered. On the contrary, you create confusion about which occurrence to answer.”

Yeah, I didn’t do that. Captcha kept saying that it was incorrect and I had to attempt to fill it out multiple times. If it was posted multiple times it was the website’s captcha system being buggy. On my end, it only passed successfully once.

I am going to disable the quotation correction and attempt to find and replace all quotes in the document and see if that repairs the issue. The doc is a full novel, 190k words. So this is… very tedious to work around.

With such a long document, I hope you are using the style system. If not, see my answer to question 320192/how-to-change-font-capitalization about the huge added-value of styles. Read the Writer Guide for an introduction and practice on scratch files.