strange opening quotation marks in Word

Hi, I think I have a fix for this now. The credit goes to Kevin O'Brien at Affirm Press. Tom, I take your point that it is a Word problem, but when googling this problem, this message board is the highest entry with the most relevant discussion, so in the interest of helping as many people as possible, I don't think it does any harm to post a possible solution here. I will also post it on any Word message board I can find that talks about this problem.

DISCLAIMER: you could do a lot of damage by clumsy Find and Replaces in the document.xml file, so people should always do a Save As first and carefully check the results, and I accept no responsibility for unintended

outcomes.

Apostrophes problem (right to left languages)

Sometimes Word docs arrive with a strange glitch in them that stops the selection point moving one space to the right as normal when the right arrow is pressed. The selection point either hangs or jumps two spaces. The

delete key also functions strangely, especially around quote marks and apostrophes in the text.

The problem is caused by xml tags incorrectly being added to the document, applying a language that reads from right to left to certain characters (especially apostrophes, for some reason). It seems to occur when an

Apple Pages document is converted into a Word document (which is one of the reasons why we advise authors to always work in Word). My way of fixing it is to go into the underlying xml and remove all the ‘right-to-left’ tags, as follows.

XML method  

1. Change the file extension of your Word document from .docx to .zip.
2. Don’t do an ‘Extract All’ on the results. Keep it as a zipped folder containing compressed files.
3. Click through the folders to navigate to /word/document.xml.
4. Copy and paste that file somewhere outside of the zip folder. This will decompress it and allow you to edit it.
5. Open the file in a plain-text word-processer such as TextPad or NotePad.
6.  Search on all the <w:rtl/> tags and replace them with nothing (i.e. deleting them). These are self-closing xml tags. There won’t be any opening tags in the file.
7. Copy document.xml back into .zip folder (you might need to delete the original file rather than overwriting it). Inside that folder, it will recompress itself.
8. Change the file extension of the zipped folder from .zip back to .docx.
9. Done! Open the file in Word.

I found this thread since I have a similar problem, exporting ios Pages to Word results in font changes, in my case Times New Roman single quotes to Arial Unicode MS and sometimes R to L direction changes. I tried the fixes mentioned here, and although exporting to rtf worked, I need a solution that does not require repairs to the text.

I found a solution:

1. In Pages make sure your font is set as desired.
2. In ios settings change “preferred languages” under Language & Region to English only.
3. Export the file to Word
4. Open the exported file in Word
5. Highlight all text and change it to any font then change it back to desired font.
6. re-export the file to Word format.

As far as I can tell, single quotes now all remain true to the font I desired. When I tried the multistep fix posted in this thread, the document.xml did not contain any <w:rtl/> tags. I saw that one of my quotes was generated by a French keyboard. I changed that tag to English using the format found elsewhere in the xml file but when I restored it I could not open the Word file. It is possible that the apps I used to make the change introduced formatting that I could not see, corrupting the file.

Bob S

You may want to ask your question in the Microsoft Word Help Community

tovered wrote:

I do a lot of proofreading and I find that in Word (Microsoft 365) that sometimes when I get a document back from someone that the opening quotation marks (and apostrophes) are in a different font/style than the rest of the document. I end up having to change each one by hand, and if I send the corrected document, and the other user opens it and sends it back to me, that the same problem occurs. Is it a PC/Mac issue? I am including an image, where you can see the "odd" opening quotation marks and apostrophes.

Thanks for the help. I have tried finding info online but no luck.

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/2881edd8-a42c-407d-aab5-7d625dc09aba

From Word Help

Smart quotes in Word

As you type text, Word automatically changes straight quotation marks ( ' or " ) to curly quotation marks (also known as "smart quotes" or typographer's quotes). And now with your feedback we have improved smart quotes feature. Any quote following an em dash(--) is now formatted as an open quote (rather than closed quote).

You can turn this feature on or off. To disable smart quotes,

On the File tab, click Options.

Click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect Options.

In the AutoCorrect dialog box, do the following:

Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab, and under Replace as you type, select or clear the "Straight quotes" with “smart quotes” check box.

Click the AutoFormat tab, and under Replace, select or clear the "Straight quotes" with “smart quotes” check box.

Click OK.

Can you tell us what the two fonts being used for begin and ending quotes are? You should be able to see the active font when you select the character. Plus the font of the text body.

Does this happen with various different people or just one?

When you put a cursor next to these weird square apostrophes, they make it look like your cursor has already gone to the right of them, even though if you then press Backspace, you will be deleting the final letter of the word to the right of them.

Thanks, PinWith. This is the problem I'm having after converting a 208,000-word Pages doc, done in Times New Roman, to Word. Going line by line to catch these weird misplaced apostrophes in the Word version, then having the cursor select and delete the wrong characters each time you try to fix this, is crazy-making.

The best I've been able to figure out is to convert from Pages format to Rich Text Format, and then open this .rtf version in Word. So far the apostrophe issue seems to be solved; margins and indents however may be different and need to be adjusted. But this fix is a matter of hours of work, not days.

That Apple hasn't addressed this problem of converting in Pages docs to Word surprises me. To simply say it's a Word problem isn't much help to writers who've been working in Word thinking they're producing files suitable to submit to traditional publishers.

The thread that won't die - now officially one year old. Happy birthday!

Here are some tips to help avoid problems like these:

1) Stick with defaults. The people who developed apps like Word and Pages know what they're doing. Don't make changes without having a good reason.

2) Pick one app and stick with it. Conversions are always going to make your life more difficult. In most cases, any submissions will require PDF, which Pages and Word can generate equally well.

3) Microsoft Word is a more powerful tool. But with great power comes great responsibility. Careful with that thing! You'll put your eye out!

4) Learn how to use Styles. This will go a long way towards eliminating problems with fonts and formatting.

5) If you ever find yourself going into XML and manually editing tags, then stop, take a moment, and review your life choices. At some point, something went really south. Select all > Style = Body or Normal > confirm change all > yes. Then go back and set the appropriate style for anything that needs italics or underlines.

sarak42 wrote:

Thank you!!! This was a huge help!!

Other than advising authors to use Word and not Pages (some may not have access to Word for whatever reason)

A possible substitute for Word that can avoid the potential problems with Pages is the free Word clone LibreOffice.

I keep telling the proofreader that this is not a formatting problem in Word. I've scoured the internet for a fix to this problem and just discovered that this issue always happens when the client uses Pages that got converted to WORD. The smart quotes feature is broken and the ONLY way to fix it is to manually delete those quirky quotes one by one.

So for goodwill, I manually changed the quotes. But then, when I made a copy of that fixed Word file to create a paperback version (this is a book manuscript), all the smart quotes I manually added are gone again and this time, they don't want to be changed.

I've fixed the language to English, Auto formatted, I've tried every fix (except for the XML because I can't find the word/xml file he mentioned) but nothing!

Won't someone solve this problem please...

I don't see any problem with the quote characters. Those are typographers quotes.

It is difficult to see in the image. I does look like the starting quote character is a different font or something from the ending one. The ending one looks bigger. It should look like “this”. You can copy and paste that text to a larger size and change the font to see how it should look.

You might also want to recommend that the author use the original Russian instead of a transliteration. I know that's not a technical issue. But if people figure out how to properly use Unicode in documents, it makes the content much more high quality. The quotes do look like some kind of Unicode problem. For something like this, you can just track down the quote on a Russian-language site and paste it right in: “Петербургу быть пусту”

I have the exact same problem and no one here has solved it yet. I'm a full-time editor and proofreader. I haven't had this problem before the last month or so, so I think it must be to do with an update either to Pages or to Word.

When you put a cursor next to these weird square apostrophes, they make it look like your cursor has already gone to the right of them, even though if you then press Backspace, you will be deleting the final letter of the word to the right of them.

The doc I'm currenlty working in is mostly in Times New Roman. I initially highlighted the offending apostrophes (which are squareish, wrongly spaced, and look like the ones BEFORE Petersburg and pustu in the example, not the rounded ones after), and thought I discovered that they were in Arial Unicode MS. I did a Find and Replace for that font, but the search barely picked up any of the problem characters. A little later I highlighted one that was wrong and it came up as being "Helvetica Neue", again I tried the Find and Replace but Word didn't seem to be able to recognise them. I have no idea why it's happening or how to weed them out other than one by one. It is infuriating!

It’s not a problem that anyone can solve. You just have to change the fonts. Word in particular is tricky with respect to style changes. Changes tend to take effect just after the insertion point. And if you are working with something like a quote character, the kerning can make it behave strangely. You’ll need to select an entire run of text and change the font that way. For Word, I strongly recommend mastering styles. Remove any and all formatting from the original text and use styles.

PinWith wrote: I have the exact same problem and no one here has solved it yet. I'm a full-time editor and proofreader. I haven't had this problem before the last month or so, so I think it must be to do with an update either to Pages or to Word.

How is Pages involved in your problem? This thread is about Word. Have you asked in the Word forum already?

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-msoffice_OfH-mso_OPMac?sort=LastReplyDate&dir=Desc&tab=All&status=all&mod=&modAge=&advFil=&postedAfter=&postedBefore=&threadType=all&isFilterExpanded=false&page=1

Thank you!!! This was a huge help!!

Other than advising authors to use Word and not Pages (some may not have access to Word for whatever reason), do you happen to know if there's a setting in Pages or something that could be toggled off to prevent this? Is there another workaround for prevention?

Again, thank you so much for your willingness to make sure this answer is in multiple places and more easily findable!

This thread is months old. Please do not resurrect old threads.

And please do not resurrect old threads with questions that have nothing to do with the topic.

If you have having a problem with Pages, please post a new question in Pages - Apple Community