As the title says. On both 7.4.7.2 and 7.5.5.2 on MacOS 13.5, the option to turn on Smart Quotes is missing from AutoCorrect>Options. I’ve gone as far as ripping and reinstalling the application with no change. I’ve been reduced to changing them all manually.
I’ve discovered that LibreOffice won’t type smart quotes in a new document and won’t search and find text in a document, either, even after another removal and reinstall of 7.5.5. Since I have to get work done, I’m just going to stop trying to use it.
“Smart quotes” are more or less culture-dependent. Have you looked at the correct tab in the Autocorrect configuration dialog? The controls for smart quotes are in Localized Options tab.
I have. They are neither in Autocorrect>Options nor in Autocorrect>Localized Options. Also, according to the solution at How do I convert straight quotes to typographic quotes?, these should be in Options, not Localized options.
There is the option in Localized Options to replace single quotes with double quotes. Is that what that solution is referring to as “replacement of smart quotes”? I have tried changing those in several different ways without any effect.
Honestly, I’d appreciate it if someone on a Mac actually looked at the Autocorrect>Options and posted exactly what needs to be changed rather than replying “It should work.” That would let me know if I am not setting someone correctly or if what I need to set is actually missing in my copies of LibreOffice.
- Yes. And surprise, surprise, that is where those options used to be in MS Word back in the nineties. Make sure that you tick the checkbox above those settings, and tick
Autocorrect - While typingor the replacement won’t take place. - ‘Localized’ refers to everything that may be different for different countries. So, it’s a sensible choice. Besides, the dialog window would have to be quite large to accommodate the options on the
Localized optionstab on theOptionstab. Believe me or not, some thought went into designing the dialog windows. They’re quite old, and if you have been into this as long as I have and can remember the 800*600 pixels wide screens from back then, you will appreciate why they made a separate tab for them.
Unfortunately I am not on a Mac. But, just to make sure, no offence intended, have you ticked both check boxes labelled Replace?
Nice to know that LibreOffice’s UI is state-of-the-art for the 1990s.
Those were set with the unicode character addresses (I remember setting them that way some time ago buy selecting the characters from the punctuation table), so they should have produced smart quotes. And, yes, Replace was checked for both. While working to fix this today, I initially set them to Default and then back to those settings without change. And, yes, I selected all of the text and tried both Apply and Apply and Edit Changes without effect.
I finally had to uninstall LO again, go into the Library, remove LO prefs, remove the LO application support directory and its contents, restart, and reinstall LO. Now, both the smart quotes and searching (which, as I said, was also broken), are working. Oddly, this was a fresh install of 7.5 since I just got this machine at work; I updated my home machine from 7.4.7 to 7.5 and have not had this problem there (yet).
Right. Your user profile was bad. We should have thought of that possibility. All you had to do was reset the user profile. Re-installing LibreOffice doesn’t touch the user profile, so when the profile is corrupted, re-installing LO doesn’t help.
See LibreOffice user profile - The Document Foundation Wiki for help.
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