A have a large text that’s already written in the Pages app: it’s about 50,000 words. The writer has used straight quotes throughout; I want to change these to curly quotes throughout. But how? Is there a find-and-paste solution?
I’m an editor and this problem comes up all the time, and all I can do is go through the manuscript, manually changing straights to curlies. I’ve had enough of this!
—–
Dr Steve
You can do it using Replace & Find in Pages. Search for a space followed by the straight double quotes. Replace All with a space followed by the left curly quotes.
Then search for straight quotes followed by a space and replace that with the right curly quotes followed by a space.
Those two Replace & Finds should do it. If you have any straight single quotes do the same thing for them. If you have any straight apostrophes, then once you are done with the others, you should be able to replace all remaining straight single quotes with a right curly one.
Remember as you are doing this that if you mess up you can always use Edit, Undo. But I would also make sure you save first so you can Revert to an earlier version just in case.
Thanks, Gary. I had tried Find and Replace in the past, but hadn't thought to include a space, and so it hadn't worked. But this does. Brilliant! You have saved me hours of copy-editing!
Download and install WordService
Then go to Systems Prefs/Keyboard/Shortcuts/Services/Text/WordService: Smart Quotes [check box].
Then App Shortcuts – click + and type this exactly Show Substitutions and add whatever command you want