Word 2003 AutoFormat "smart quotes"

[Klaus Linke]

Twilight Zone:

I've used AutoFormat to turn "straight quotes" into »smart quotes«
(typographic quotes) hundreds and thousands of times.

In a document where I did this last week, that turned

This is an "example" of what happened.
into

This is an "»xample"«of what happened.

But not in the whole document, just in the last couple of pages.
And re-running the exact same AutoFormat on the exact same document now, I
can not reproduce it.

No unusual characters between the last quote that was formatted correctly
and the first one that was messed up, nor anything else unusual (no fields,
footnotes, objects, tracked changes... as far as I could see).

Really strange. I'm just posting this in case others came across this, too?

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Klaus,

I can get almost that effect if some of the text is formatted as French.
Maybe you were zapped by the automatic language recognition fairy?

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Jay,

Good idea... Didn't think of that, but everything is the same language, and
automatic language detection is turned off.

The »quote marks« are actually the right ones (... and I wouldn't have been
able to show English smart quotes without changing the post format to
Unicode -- which I usually mess up <g>).

They were just inserted one position off to the right, leaving the straight
quotes intact, and overwriting the next letter, by AutoFormat.

Greetings,
Klaus

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Very bizarre!

 

[Klaus Linke]

Very bizarre!

That was my final diagnosis, too <s>...

I'll just cross fingers that it was a one-time fluke -- and that it won't
happen again.

Klaus