Wade-the elephant wrote:So ever since I upgraded to El Capitan I have been having issues on TubeNet and several other forums where so-called "smart quotes" are not understood by the software. Smart quotes are where the software determines where your quoted material starts and ends and then substitutes this single character - " - with traditional typewriter open and close quotes. (Remember the days when you had two quote keys and had to use them correctly like open and close parenthesis?)
In the past Safari - all the way back to 2003 when it was released as a beta version - had the ability to use smart quotes in text boxes like the one in which I am typing right now. It has always been set to Off by default. For some reason this is now On by default. I have no idea why. Safari behaves in all other ways out of the box as is always has, but this change is in the mix now.
I keep seeing tags that look to be correctly done rendered here on TubeNet as though there has been an error in the BBCode tags. This happens all the time now for me when quoting text by another user via the Quote button. I quote them, add my text, click Submit, and lo, we have something wrong. The display of my new post does not have the nifty quote box with So-and-so Said at the top. It shows all the tags as they were typed, instead.
If you go back to fix the Smart Quotes because you want your post to look like it is supposed to look, and you delete and correct the first quote mark in the Quote tag, it is fine. Then when you go to delete and correct the second one the first one automatically reverts to a Smart Quote. You have to dick around with the stupid quote marks several times to get this action to stop. Very frustrating if you GAS about how your posts look, formatting wise...
Today I learned how to fix this both locally and globally in Safari as well as globally on the Mac. Personally I really like Smart Quotes and always have them set to On for word processing and text applications. But since BBEdit software seems to not understand these characters (they look a like but use different character code numbers and the software cannot process them) I want this stuff turned OFF when I enter text online.
I went to my Keyboard prefs in System Preferences to see if that was the problem. No. Smart Quotes are not turned on globally in the system. Good.
I then went to Safari and found that they were indeed turned on. I do not know why this is when we still have so many sites where these are not understood by the software.
Whatever...
So I turned them off for Safari. However, if YOU do not want them turned off but want to deal with this manually, a short cut is to delete the offending marks, replace them, and when they automatically switch from regular quotes to open and close quote you can hit Undo (command/z). The computer's changing these characters are counted as YOUR keystrokes, so Undo will revert them to what you actually typed and will prevent them from changing back again on their own. This is a PITA, but it works on a case-by-case basis, allowing you to keep Smart Quotes enabled in Safari if you wish.
I hate that and wanted it OFF! The way you do this is to open Safari, navigate to a forum like TubeNet, start a new post but do not actually type anything, then go to the Edit menu, Substitutions, and deselect Smart Quotes. This will ensure that when you hit the Quote button here in TubeNet that Safari will not "correct" the quotes in the tag and your quoted text will display correctly when you hit Submit.
Hope this helps a few of you. I have been seeing a lot of this on the forum for months now, making it look like none of us can format quotes correctly.
VERY helpful...thanks!!
Mark
