How to replace typewriter (straight) apostrophe with typographic (curly) apostrophe?

I have a manuscript I got off the Internet that has a bunch of isn?t's and wasn?t's and the like—due, I assume, to some miscommunication between MS Word's automatic curly quotes and the ASCII limits of ISO Latin 1. I tried doing a find-and-replace to put typographic apostrophes in place of the question marks. Pages found the question marks and put typewriter apostrophes in place of them, though I'd carefully entered a typographical apostrophe ((opt-shift-]) in the Replace field. So I tried again, to replace the typewriter apostrophes with typographical apostrophes. Pages now replaced the few typographical apostrophes I'd manually entered with typewriter apostrophes. Well, at least it's consistent. So far as Pages, Apple's flagship word-processing/page-layout app is concerned, there's apparently no such thing as a typographical apostrophe—something that was understood, as I recall, by the original MacWrite 25 years ago. So do I have to go back to doing all my editing in TextEdit (which seems to be much better at text work than Pages), or can somebody tell me how to persuade Pages to take care of this trifling little task correctly?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.4GHz (2010), 4GB RAM, 320GB HD

Posted on May 28, 2012 6:23 PM

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Posted on May 28, 2012 7:25 PM

I, like Peter, thought copy and paste might be more accurate than typing into the Find and Replace fields, but I got the same results you did. (I am also using 10.6.8).


Then I reset my Preference to Use Smart Quotes (my default, but I had switched it off to create the sample text with straight apostrophes) and just typed a regular (typewriter) apostrophe into the replace field. When I ran replace, I had the curly apostrophes. Might work for you.

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How to replace typewriter (straight) apostrophe with typographic (curly) apostrophe?

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