Smart Quotes

[David Veeneman]

What's the best way to insert typographical quotes (so-called 'smart quotes'
or 'curly quotes') into OneNote 2007 pages? Right now, I'm using ALT-key
combinations (Alt-0145 through Alt-0148). Is there a simpler way to do it?
Thanks.

 

[John Guin]

Hello David,

Try this:
Start Word
Type some quotes to get the "smart quote" behavior
Copy a quote mark to the clipboard
In OneNote, click Tools | Autocorrect Options
Add a new line for replace text as you type
--<<old style quote>> with <<smart quote pasted from clipboard>>

Does that help?
John Guin
OneNote Test Team
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin

 

[David Veeneman]

Thanks, John, but I'm afraid that doesn't help.

Here's why: There are two different smart-quote characters for each
dumb-quote character. The dumb single-quote character gets replaced by an
opening single-quote (Keycode ALT-0145) at the beginning of a quote, and by
a closing single-quote (Keycode ALT-0146) at the end of a quote, like this:

'Mary had a little lamb'

The same holds true for double quotes, where the dumb double-quote character
gets replaced by an opening double-quote (Keycode ALT-0147) at the beginning
of a quote, and by a closing double-quote (Keycode ALT-0148) at the end of
a quote, like this:

"Mary had a little lamb"

Copying a smart quote character from Word to OneNote's AutoCorrect feature
will replace all occurrences of the dumb quote with whatever character I
copied. For example, if I copied an opening quote character from Word, I
would end up with an opening quote mark at the beginning and the end of a
quoted phrase, instead of an opening quote at the beginning and a closing
quote at the end.

I hope that makes sense. To do smart quotes, an application has to know
whether the quote is being placed at the beginning or at the end of a quoted
phrase. It uses that result to replace the dumb quote with the appropriate
smart quote character.

It would probably take an add-in to get the job done, and I was hoping
someone had written one for OneNote. Since that doesn't seem to be the case,
could you see that it gets added to the user wish-list for the next version
of OneNote? And if you know any OneNote add-in gurus within MS, that would
be a great add-in for the Office add-ins site.

Thanks again for your help!