Pages ’09: Smart quotes and Find/Replace features

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
November 30th, 2009 • 6:38 pm

A while ago, I ranted about Pages ’09’s on-going apparent inability to do what I ask it to do when it comes to replacing straight apostrophes with curly ones or vice-versa.

This week-end, I was able to better pinpoint the exact source of the problem. In a nutshell, the problem is that the “Use smart quotes” option in Pages ’09’s preferences supersedes the choices you might make in the “Find/Replace” dialog box:

Smart Quotes pref

For example, if you uncheck the “Use smart quotes” option in Pages ’09’s preferences and then bring up the “Find/Replace” dialog box and enter a straight apostrophe in the “Find:” field and a curly apostrophe in the “Replace:” field and then hit “Replace All,” Pages ’09 replaces any occurrence of an apostrophe, whether it’s straight, curled to the left or curled to the right, with… a straight apostrophe.

Conversely, if you check the “Use smart quotes” option in Pages ’09’s preferences and then bring up the “Find/Replace” dialog box and enter a straight apostrophe in the “Find:” field and a curly apostrophe in the “Replace:” field and then hit “Replace All,” Pages ’09 replaces any occurrence of an apostrophe, whether it’s straight, curled to the left or curled to the right, with… an apostrophe curled either to the left or to the right, depending on what Pages ’09 think is appropriate in the context in which the apostrophe appears.

Why would you want to uncheck the “Use smart quotes” option in the first place? might you ask. Well, I happen to be a long-time Spell Catcher X user, and the software came with its own “smart quotes” feature long before Apple even came up with a word processor of its own. So I have become used to using Spell Catcher X‘s smart quotes feature, and I don’t need the one in Pages ’09.

But that does not mean that I don’t want to be able to use Find/Replace in Pages ’09 to change existing quotes and apostrophes! I use Spell Catcher X, for the most part, as an interactive tool that acts on my text input as I type it. But when I receive texts from other people or copy text from various sources, sometimes I simply want to be able to use Find/Replace in Pages ’09 to effect batch changes.

Because the result of Find/Replace operations in Pages ’09 is tied to the “Use smart quotes” option, it makes it rather difficult and frustrating to try and control what happens to straight and curly quotes and apostrophes.

In addition, there is simply something nonsensical about Pages ’09 replacing curly apostrophes with straight ones when I ask it to do the exact opposite in the “Find/Replace” dialog box. It seems to me that, when I take pains to enter a straight apostrophe in the “Find:” field and a curly one (specifically curled in one direction) in the “Replace:” field, I indicate quite clearly what I want to achieve. But I don’t get the expected result at all.

I would understand the “Use smart quotes” option applying if all I entered in the “Find/Replace” dialog box was straight quotes and straight apostrophes. But that’s not what I do, and I expect Pages ’09 to be smarter about this than it currently is.

The situation in French is even worse, because the nonsensical behaviour extends to French quotation marks as well. If Pages ’09 were consistent, I would expect it to automatically change any occurrence of a straight English quotation mark (“) with the appropriate French quotation mark and non-breaking space (either “« ” before or ” »” after) depending on the context when I use the Find/Replace feature to replace a English quotation mark with an English quotation mark with “Use smart quotes” on. But that’s not what it does. It replaces the straight English quotes with… curly English quotes.

And if I turn the “Use smart quotes” feature off and try to replace occurrences of English curly quotes with French quotation marks (“ with « and ” with  »), that totally fails too, because Pages ’09 is unable to differentiate between a “ (English opening curly quote) and a ” (English closing curly quote). Argh.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect Apple to care much about all this, both because I am a Spell Catcher X user and because I am a bilingual user. I am obviously in a small minority and my bug reports will be ignored.

But it seems to me that Apple has really not put much thought into this at all, and that the default behaviours of the Find/Replace feature in Pages ’09 can easily become fairly nonsensical, whether the “Use smart quotes” feature is on or off.


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