mac mail Yosemite bobbles apostrophe?

This may or may not be useful but I too had this bug and reported it to Apple. I did notice however that a clean install of Yosemite e.g. on the Apple store machines, did not exhibit this issue. In trying to resolve another problem I repaired permissions. Intriguingly this Mail problem disappeared. I can now select "Check when I send" or "Check while I type" or "Never" and no typing problems. Might be worth a try as this problem only seems to manifest itself on an Upgrade from say Mavericks to Yosemite and thus may (or may not!!) be a simple permissions issue. Who knows?

Drove me mad too. What worked for me is go to System Preferences / Keyboard / Select the "Text" tab, and uncheck "use smart quotes and dashes".

This way, I can leave the message format at "Rich Text" and "Check spelling" set to "never" in Mail preferences, without apostrophe weirdness kicking in.

I confirm that

• selecting "spell check while typing" or
• unchecking "intelligent" quotes in System Prefs -> Text

both make my problem disappear. You might also want to check the options in Mail->Edit->Substitutions->Show substitutions menu: maybe the "Curvy quotes" checkbox interferes with the global setup in the System Preferences...

However my problem was sligthly different: whenever entering an apostrophe (') at the end of a line (i.e. ALWAYS when normally typing new text before a signature!!!), the cursor jumps to the next line, so that it is impossible for me to write

we're

When I type that, I get

we'

re

instead.

More generally, when I try to insert an apostrophe inside a word, the cursor jumps after the next letter. So typing

abcde

and inserting apostrophes after the first letter a (by going back 4 chars, or setting cursor with the mouse), I get:

a’b’c’d’e’

‹›’’’’'

instead of the expected

a''''''''''bcde

(I selected the "intelligent" quotes to transform 'single quotes' into ‹single quotes›, so that the transformation can be seen)

In this example, inserting the quote after "e" at the end of line makes the cursor jump over the next character (i.e. newline). Then the next apostrophe at the beginning of line is immediately transformed into an opening single quote . The next one is transformed into a closing single quote. And the following ones are undecided/untransformed.

To get even more fun: after the previous example, try moving 4 chars backwards, and press fgh You should get:

a’b’c’d’e’

‹›’f’’’’

gh

Now it's standard characters that make the cursor jump over the apostrophes!!!

It thus seems to me that the "intelligent quote" algorithm going on when a quote is pressed has a completely flawed "look-ahead+memory" mechanism. It might be confused by the content-encoding of the rich-text format: some have more bytes-per-chars than others... And by the way, where has gone the content-encoding selection of rich-text messages???

This was a real pain. I had this problem as well. For me, what fixed it was turning off the Rich Formatting in the Mail Preferences. Changing things in Edit > Substitutions did nothing.

Mail > Preferences > Composing > change Rich Formatting to Plain Text.

Sometimes there are gems to be found perusing the posts.

Settings that one forgot that [I] adjusted & never got back to revisiting – to be sure it meshes well.

I had my setting on “NEVER” for a long time as well, to reduce the annoyances of spellcheckers that decide to roll one's words into something new on sending, especially when writing in multiple languages. I will try your suggestion on “as I type,” too.

Preferences > Composing > Check Spelling dropbox...

! Now if only there was an embedded fix for those bad period - apostrophe errors.

Its chronic on the web - people don’t seem to grasp that proper English punctuation usually places the period / comma INSIDE the closed quotes.

Orj wrote:

And by the way, where has gone the content-encoding selection of rich-text messages???

Apple deleted the Message > Text Encoding menu item starting with OS 10.9. As a result, Mail users cannot fix incoming messages which have the wrong encoding or change the encoding of outgoing messages to meet special needs of some recipients. Apple's stupidity in this area is hard to understand.

Tom Gewecke wrote:

Orj wrote:

And by the way, where has gone the content-encoding selection of rich-text messages???

Apple deleted the Message > Text Encoding menu item starting with OS 10.9. As a result, Mail users cannot fix incoming messages which have the wrong encoding or change the encoding of outgoing messages to meet special needs of some recipients. Apple's stupidity in this area is hard to understand.

Too bad indeed. So then, the default is apparently UTF-8, as can be seen in the raw content of a sent message:

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Content-Type: text/plain;

charset=utf-8

Notice the line-break before the last line: I think many mailers expect single-line "Content-Type" instructions, and thus ignore the charset. This might be why forwards of your message by non-mac mailers get full of "@" characters instead of accents. I wonder what is the "right" RFC syntax, but this is another problem.

Orj wrote:

So then, the default is apparently UTF-8

It can be otherwise if you are running your OS in another language. The default for S. Chinese is gb2312.

I haven't seen that line break in the tests I've done, it's all on the same line.

For me only unchecking "Use smart quotes and dashes" in System Preferences worked.

gatek, Thank you!

This was driving me nuts and and Iike to have my spell check at the end, so I tried turing off 'Use smart quotes and dashes' (not in mail) in keyboard systems prefs and bingo! no more annoying issue.

Thx

SOLUTION seems to be: Go to System Preferences / Keyboard / Select the "Text" tab, and uncheck "use smart quotes and dashes". Since I don't know when or how I'd ever use a smart quote - and all I really want to do is eliminate the line return every time I type ' in Mail.

For me, it was a matter of turning "Use smart quotes and dashes" off - and THEN ON again. Now it works perfectly. (Oh, there have been coming some irritated noises from me while writing in Mail. No such noises now! 🙂 )

Update: it seems unstable. After a few hours the problem returned, so it seems I have to keep "Use smart quotes and dashes" off, until the bug is fixed by Apple.

NO. This is NOT a bug. This is Apple migrating any and all features of iOS over to the desktop. They are idiots thinking that this functionality is a good thing for a desktop environment. It is annoying on an iDevice but makes sense there with the lack of menu items and a multitude of other options. On a desktop it's a god-**** pain in the a.... !! I for one am rather accurate with my typing and since switching to the POS they call Yosemite I am constantly having to make many many more corrections because of their incompetence.

People that are used to typing at high speed are getting tripped up with this half-baked attempt at word auto-complete on the desktop. We are not used to only typing a letter or two then having the system predict and autocomplete the rest of the word for us while at a desktop.

Jobs passed away and everyone at Apple went "dumb". 10.7 thru 10.10 have progressivley gotten worse with each subsequent release. Time for an overhaul Apple and stop making our desktops try to be phones.

This should be an option to TURN ON (opt into) NOT an option that p*sses you off until you have to scour the Internet for a solution only to find it was enabled by default.

Got that disabled. It's still frakking doing it.