Lost my special speech marks « ».

[Dave Neve]

Hi

I have Word in Office 2003 programmed to change the standard speech marks "
" into « »

Although the Window 'Automatic Corrections' and 'At the moment of typing'
(or whatever it is called in English cos I'm on a French computer) is
ticked, the function no longer changes the speech marks.

What could be stopping it please?

Thanks in advance

Dave Neve

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In English it's AutoFormat As You Type. Is the language of the text set to
French? Ctrl+A, Tools | Language | Set Language and make sure that French is
selected (and for good measure, clear the check box for "Detect language
automatically" or whatever it is in French).

 

[Dave Neve]

Thanks Sue.

Another bulleye (spot on advice)

But why won't it work when the language chosen is "English" cos I'm working
on an English text.

Any workarounds???

Thanks

 

[DeanH]

also had this problem when I received my new machine, which had been built
in France, and installed as English.
Changing the Locale in Region Language (Control Panel) did stop some most of
the French occurrences, but not all.
Eventually I had the Language code in the Registry changed from the code for
France to the code for United Kingdom. Since then I have had no problems.
Hope this helps.
Best of luck
DeanH

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Dave,

The programming is not for << and >>. It is for "smart quotations". Smart
quotations vary by language.

English doesn't use << and >> for quotation marks (sorry, I know that's not
the right character). It uses curly quotation marks. So the same setting,
when typing in English, will change straight quotation marks into ones that
are curled toward the text. You might not have noticed, looking for <<, but
that *should* have happened. I'm not sure what you mean by "work" in this
case.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It depends on what you mean by "programmed." If, as Daiya assumes (and as I
also assumed), you have just enabled the AutoFormat As You Type option to
replace straight quotes with smart quotes, then the reason is that English
uses (as Daiya points out) "curly quotes" rather than guillemets.

If you want to use guillemets even when the language of the selection is
English, then you'll have to take another tack. With the insertion point in
a selection formatted as English, add two AutoCorrect entries, to convert <<
to « and >> to ». These will be saved in your English-language AutoCorrect
file, so they will not affect French but will give you a way to insert
guillemets in English text.