specifying "straight quotes" in style sheet?

[pvz]

Hi,

I'm looking for a way to define a style (either character or paragraph - we use both for "code") that converts any smart quotes to straight quotes. Currently (I'm on Flare 10.2.0) we are sometimes ending up with smart quotes in our code samples in HTML Help, and ideally I'd like Flare to switch these to straight quotes when the style is monospaced font.

Can anyone suggest a way to do this?

thanks!
paul

[NorthEast]

I would just use a find/replace.

You could do this using a script, but that's only good for help targets (not print/PDF), and is a bit over-the-top anyway.

I'd check how the smart quotes are getting in code examples in the first place, since they'd presumably be invalid in most circumstances/languages; e.g. are they written in Word or something?

[doc_guy]

Unfortunately, this is a project-level setting, not a style-specific setting. Once you turn smart quotes on, all new quotes that you type will be smart quotes.

If you want some styles to NOT have smart quotes, then you have to insert straight quotes manually, or go through a find-and-replace excercise for just those elements that shouldn't have smart quotes.

This is the main reason I don't use smart quotes at all -- because I can't choose WHEN they are used, and Flare isn't intelligent about figuring out when they should and shouldn't be used.

I'd say this is a feature request, to be able to determine on a style-by-style basis whether or not to enable smart quotes. I see this as being something like:

Code: Select all

body {
     mc-smart-quotes:enabled;
}

span.code, p.code {
     mc-smart-quotes:disabled;
}

Then Flare would be responsible for making the quotes correctly at build time.

[NorthEast]

Aha. I've just learnt Flare has a smart quotes setting, but also that it's a complete pain to use!

[pvz]

Thanks for the input. This confirms that I hadn't missed anything.

FWIW, the smart quotes setting in Flare doesn't really figure into this for us - we never enable it. But we're still getting smart quotes in our monospaced font styles when writers copy/paste from email (Outlook) or docs that developers send. I'll admit, we should make sure all styling is stripped out, but we're lazy, or overlook it.

Our most likely workflow is to copy/paste into notepad++, then copy again and paste into Flare, where we tag with our "code" style.

I was just hoping for something smarter on the Flare side of things.

I appreciate everyone's thoughts.

pvz

[doc_guy]

@pvz - Copying and pasting through Notepadd++ is likely your best option, then, as you said. However, you should be able to do a global find and replace to look for the entity that has the curly quote and just replace it with a straight quote.

@dave - Indeed. Smart quotes are new in Flare 10, but I don't think they are all that smart. They are just automatic. If they were smart, they'd let me choose which styles need them and which styles shouldn't ever use them.