Ben wrote:
Do you know why in InDesign, the “Use Typographer’s Quotes” preference just toggles off every now and again?
Yeah, this can be an annoying one. For those who don’t know, this is a preference that lives inside the Type pane of the Preferences dialog box. When it is on, you get proper typographer’s quotes whenever you press the single or double quote key on the keyboard.
In the US, that means “curly” quotes, but it might mean guillamet or other quote types in other languages. (You can control that in the Dictionary pane of the Preferences dialog box.)
However, sometimes you’ll find yourself typing along and you’ll type a quote and it won’t be a proper typographer’s quote! What happened?
The answer is almost always: You turned off the preference accidentally. You’d think that would be hard to do, since it’s inside a dialog box. But actually, you can toggle this preference on or off with a keyboard shortcut: Hold down Command-Option-Shift- or Ctrl-Alt-Shift- and press ‘ (that’s a single quote). So you were flailing around on the keyboard, you might press that accidentally.
Another possibility may be that you held down the Ctrl key on the Mac while pressing the quote keys. That temporarily disables the “make it curly” feature.
This article was last modified on December 30, 2021
This article was first published on February 26, 2014
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