Spell checking and apostrophes

[cabb]

I’m using Writer v.5.0.2.2 on Mac OS Yosemite and my keyboard layout is U.S. Extended, since i need to work with a large variety of languages. When I write apostrophes through ALT+I SPACE ( ʼ ), the Italian and english (UK and US) spell checking marks it as a mistake, while the same words would not be marked if I use autocorrection from straight quotes ( ’ ). Weird thing is they look exactly the same, and it is not marked as a mistake everywhere, for example “nellʼacqua” would be marked while “lʼacqua” would not. In english “Weʼre” would not be considered a mistake while “Wouldnʼt” would be considered a mistake. Writing “Wouldn’t” and having the straight quote autocorrected to the apostrophe would not be marked as a mistake instead.
What is the problem with the the use of ALT+I to type apostrophes?

[AlexKemp]

Hi cabb

I got a feeling that, whilst you use the word ‘apostrophe’, you & others may be talking about different characters. Let’s try first to give you a menu to choose from:-

• ’ (U+0027) APOSTROPHE (note: neutral (vertical) glyph with mixed usage)
  
  [preferred characters in English for paired quotation marks are ‘ (U+2018) & ’ (U+2019)]

• ʼ (U+02BC) MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE (note: many languages use this as a letter of their alphabets)
• ՚ (U+055A) ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE
• ‘ (U+2018) LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
• ’ (U+2019) RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (note: this is the preferred character to use for apostrophe)
• ＇ (U+FF07) FULLWIDTH APOSTROPHE

’ (U+0027) APOSTROPHE ' is from US-ASCII (7-bit char). Thank god, the world has got a bit bigger than that today. However, for yourself the question is what char of the many possible APOSTROPHE is that keyboard shortcut producing?

“What is the problem with the the use of ALT+I to type apostrophes?”

My own experiments, using the text that you put in your question, indicates that “ALT+I” enters ʼ (U+02BC) MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE. I’ve placed the results into an ODT. Both the image of & the file itself are attached:-

apostrophe.odt

So, the answer to your question:-

Auto Spell-check does not actually speak EN nor IT; it is just a database, after all. The issue is that it can recognise the string of characters “We’re” (U+0027) or “We’re” (U+2019), because they are each in the DB. However, it can NOT recognise “Weʼre” (U+02BC) because that is NOT in the DB.

You can fix this in one of 3 ways:-

1. (kbd):right-click→Add to Dictionary
2. (kbd):right-click→Always correct to
3. (menu):Tools→Autocorrect Options...→Localised Options (tab)
   
   change the Single Quotes Start Quote to (U+02BC)

If this helps then please tick the answer ()

…and/or show you like it with an uptick (∧)