Yo, pretty ladies around the world

[venta]

Morning, LJ. I've got stuck in that loop where I have buckets of posts I've been intending to make, and thus can't post about anything because I need to sort the backlog out first.

Accordingly, I'm declaring Amnesty On Everything, because I'd like to ask a question :)

I have a lot of Word documents, where I have pasted in text written in a text editor and then edited it in Word. The net effect is that I end up with a mixed bag of "straight" ASCII quote marks and apostrophes, and fancy Unicode left- or right-handed quote marks and apostrophes.

What is the best way of sorting this out?

I expect to continue writing ASCII text documents in my favourite text editor and pasting them into Word, so anything that prevents this situation from arising would also be useful.

Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Go into Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options > AutoFormat, select whichever one you want (straight quotes or smart quotes) and then do an edit and replace on the quotation marks in the whole document. Even though you're just replacing the relevant character with itself, the AutoFormat will kick in at the same time and make them all consistent.

As for preventing it in future, you can also set the default paste to merge or strip formatting, depending on which you want.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

This is exactly what I would suggest.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Thank you, you're a hero. This is exactly the kind of stuff I don't know about Word, and had failed to locate when browsing around the options!

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a bit like Livejournal, actually - can do more or less anything you want if you know how, but finding the right levers and knobs isn't intuitive.

To set your default paste options, BTW, go to Options > Advanced, and it's the second set of options down.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Thanks again!

On the plus side, my complete lack of facility with Word means that successfully editing a footer (which I have just done) feels like a major achievement!

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Find and replace? Either from open/close to straight, or from space-straight to space-open and straight-space to close-space. I'm not sure how to avoid it happening in the first place.

Got a weird thing to show ya so tell all the boys and girls

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

I'm just here for the kudos...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Then kudos you shall have :-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

... though if you Google for the lyrics, the top result is Google's own lyric engine thingy, which reports it as beginning "Your pretty ladies...". I'm pretty sure that can't be right :)

[shermarama]

Putting in a cameo appearance? :D

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

I see what you did there, and I approve!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Your favorite text editor may be able to automatically enter proper quote/apostrophe characters (my favorite editor can but I don’t know if it’s the same as your favorite editor).

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm too scared to tell you what my favourite is, in case it's not :-)

(Also, I regard the straight ones as proper ones!)

[lnr]

So do I!