How to Auto Update Straight Quotation Marks

Pages was never designed to be a Word clone, so it has positive and negative qualities when contrasted with Word. One of the negatives is its Find/Replace facility. The characteristics of straight quotes is that they are preceded by, or trailed by white-space. That should remain true at the end of a sentence too, unless followed by a paragraph mark.

In the Edit menu : Substitutions sub-menu, uncheck Smart Quotes before you attempt the following. In either of the following two paragraphs, it should “light up” the Find characters, but if it does not, click the '>' button in the Find/Replace panel, and that will do the trick.

To replace left straight quotes, type a space followed by a straight, double-quote in the Find field. In the replacement field, type a space followed by a left, smart double quote — entered by option + { on a U.S. keyboard.

To replace right straight quotes, type the straight, double quote followed by a space in the Find field. In the replacement field, type a right, smart double-quote — entered by option + shift + { on a U.S. keyboard — followed by a space.

Tested: Pages v7.2, macOS 10.13.6.

I am superceding my prior post with a recommendation to use the free WordService services suite to select content containing the straight double-quotes, and apply the WordService Smart Quotes service to fix left and right quotes simultaneously with a single click. It works in Pages '09, and Pages v7.2.

Here is a link on how to get and configure WordService to solve ascending/descending sorts of lists of text in a document body, but it also illustrates enabling the WordService Smart Quotes service.