Tips For Typing Quotation Marks and Apostrophes On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Let's talk about typing quotation marks and apostrophes on your Mac. 

Now typing quotation marks or apostrophes on your Mac is probably something you haven't thought much about. But watch what happens when I type some. I'm just going to type something pretty simple, like that. All I did to type the quotation marks was to use the Shift and the key just to the left of Return on US keyboard. But notice here how the first time I did it, it gave me a character that looks like this.The second time I did it it gave me a character that looks like this. They are actually two different characters. A left double quote and a right double quote. These are called Curly Quotes and if you look here at the first line you'll see two different kinds of double Curly Quotes. That's two little marks to the left and two little marks to the right. These are different than what are called Straight Quotes, which are straight up and down and are the same whether on the left side of words or the right side of words. In addition, you've also got single quotes. So you've got a single left Curly Quote and a single right Curly Quote. You also have Straight single quotes like this. 

These single quotes look a lot like apostrophes. In fact they are the same character. You can have either a curved one which is the same as the right single Curly Quote but you can also have a Straight one. So what's going on here? That I can type a double quote like this and then with the same key on the keyboard I get a different kind of character on the other side. This is what's called Smart Quotes. So you're typing the same thing but the app you're using is recognizing that one of these things has a letter to the right of it and another has a letter to the left of it. It is giving you a different character in those two different situations. The same is true for single quotes. So the same key but without the shift you get two different characters. Then when you use an apostrophe, like this, it's using that right single quote there. It recognizes that between two letters it's an apostrophe and it's going to curve it that way. 

However, this is functionality you can turn Off if you like. If you go to the Edit menu in most apps and you go down to substitutions, look for Smart Quotes. If you turn that Off then when you type notice that you get straight double or single quotes and straight apostrophes. So it's a feature of the software. It is nothing special that your keyboard is doing. It is going to vary per app. Some apps may not use Smart Quotes at all. In this case in Pages here you can change it by going to Edit and then Substitutions and you've got it right here. You also have it in some apps, like in Pages, under Settings. You go in Pages, Settings to Autocorrection you'll find a checkbox here, Uses Smart Quotes & Dashes. If you turn that Off it will actually switch off this checkmark here in Edit, Substitutions. So they are the same setting. 

Here we can see in TextEdit you also have, under Edit, Substitutions, the Smart Quotes option and in TextEdit, Settings you've got that right here as well. In Safari you won't find it in Settings but you will find it in the Edit Menu under Substitution as long as the page you're on actually has a text input field. So if the app has neither a Setting nor something in the Edit Menu for this you can go to System Settings and look there for Keyboard. Then go to Input Sources and then Edit and select All Input Sources here. You'll find a Setting for Smart Quotes right here that is a Systemwide Setting. So an app can override this. But if the app has no setting for it, it should follow this.

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Now if you'd rather type these characters on your own you can. In Pages here I'm going to go to Edit, Substitutions and I'm going to turn off Smart Quotes. So now if I type you can see it is not using them. However, I can manually enter those characters using Option and then the left square bracket, like that. Then I can type what I want and then Option, Shift and the left square bracket for the other side. Likewise, for a single quote I can do Option and the right square bracket and then Option Shift and the right square bracket there. You may be wondering if there is a way to do the opposite. If you've got Substitutions, Smart Quotes turned On then you're going to get the Curly Quotes no matter what. But you can can get Straight Quotes if you work at it. There are a few different ways. One is to type and get the Curley Quote and then immediately do Command Z, for Undo. That gives you the Straight Quote. Then you have to go and use the Forward Arrow to go to the next character and start typing. Then if I try to do the right quote look what happens. You can see it made the left quote Curly but I put Command Z to Undo it. So working with Command Z you can usually get a Straight Quote. But you can also Copy & Paste. I can Copy this Straight double quote here and type, like that, and if I Paste the Straight Quote over the Curley Quote then it usually works. But you can see sometimes it really tries to force it in there. Command A will Undo it and pasting it win there again. 

There's another way to do it though. Instead of just typing Shift and the Quote Key, like that, use the Control Key as well. Control Shift and then Quote gives you Straight quotes. Then start typing. Then remember Control Shift and Double Quotes again and that usually gives you the Straight Quotes either for Double Quotes or Single Quote.

The same thing for Apostrophes. Just typing here will give me the curved ones since I have Smart Quotes turned On. But Control and then that same key there will give me the Straight key.  But you kind of have to keep your eye on it. If it does the wrong thing you just try again. 

Now there's an interesting thing to note in Edit & Substitutions. If you choose Show Substitutions here in Pages you get this little controller here. What you can do with this there 's a Replace All button. So you can retroactively go back in your document and replace all your Straight Quotes with Curly Quotes. You don't have to do it manually one-by-one. So here I'm going to click Replace All and you can see how it fixes everything. I'll Undo here and let's just make this selection here. You see how I can go in here, and Replace in Selection Only. So I'll leave this one alone. 

You can also fine tune things. You may have noticed in System Settings here under Keyboard and then also in Input Sources you've got, For Double Quotes and For Single Quotes. You can choose from a variety of different options. Many of these are the common way to do double and single quotes in different languages. You have these choices here. You also have have Straight Quotes as the last option. So, for instance, if I wanted all double quotes to be straight but all single quotes and apostrophes to be curved I can choose one and then the other here. More likely you'd want to do it in the app. So, in Pages here I can go to Settings. Under Auto-Correction I can set double quotes to be curved but single quotes to be straight. So now when I type I get the curved double quotes and I get these straight single quotes. But note that apostrophes will still be curved. 

A few other tips. One is If you use the Emoji & Special Characters viewer with the Globe Key and e or Control Command Space, then if you search for Quote you'll find a variety of different kinds of quotes that you can use here. So, for instance, if you want to do something really cool with these big quotes, like that, then you certainly could do that. 

Another reason you may want to use the Straight Single or Double Quotes is for representing any math things. Like, for instance, if you want to say ten feet five inches you may not want the curly quotes there. You may want to have the straight ones. Do Control and then the Quote Key for the straight one and then Shift Control for that. That's for other math uses as well.  But probably the main reason is that you want to use Straight Double or single quotes is when you're coding or showing code in a document. As a matter of fact it is a big problem when in see example code online. You Copy & Paste it. If the quotes are curved typically that gives you an error message whether you are doing HTML, Swift, or JAVA or whatever and you want the straight quotes. So when you're producing documents with computer code in them you want to make sure the computer code uses the proper Straight Single or Double Quotes. Not the curved quotes you would use when writing regular text. 

Also note there is another key on your keyboard that seems to be similar to an apostrophe. This is the Backtick key on US keyboards that is right above the Tab Key. The Backtick is sometimes used in compute code. But it is not an apostrophe or single quote, even a left single quote. The proper left single quote is typed with the regular quote key and then something and then the regular quote key, like that. You can see the Backtick is not either a curved quote or straight quote or apostrophe. It is a totally different character that you normally don't use when writing. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.