inDesign Tip #12 Converting Typographer’s (Smart) Quotes into Straight (Dumb) Quotes

What we are accomplishing: Changing Typographer’s quotes into straight quotes, or vice versa, for an entire document.  For a detailed explanation over dumb/smart quotes, visit this link.

For some designers, quotes can be a bit of hassle if a situation calls for a specific type.  Some company’s prefer the smart quote because it is more appropriate for design than the dumb quote.  However some instances would require the use of the dumb quotes to fill a certain criteria.  Here are two examples that I have faced regularly.

1.)  The use of dumb or straight quotes is the proper way to define measurement.  Therefore if you have inches (“) or feet (‘), the proper way to display them would be with straight quotes.

2.)  When using the Adobe program Flash, programming language is set to recognize straight quotes instead of typographer’s quotes for certain functions.  Therefore, if you copy text that you have written in inDesign over to Flash’s Actionscript without using straight quotes, any code that uses quotes will not function correctly.

So, now that I have fully explained the use of straight and typographer’s quotes, I shall move on to the solution to change all instances of them in a document.

To change your documents default use of quotes, go into your “Preferences” panel and select “Type…”.  Once here, you can turn on or off the use of Typographer’s quotes at the top the dialog box.  Now that your typographer’s quotes are off (or on) you can proceed to change them.  Please note, that turning on or off the typographer’s quotes in the dialog box will not change all the instances that you currently have in your document. To change all instances, you will have to do a find and replace.  Press ctrl+F to open the “Find and Replace” dialog box.  All you have to do is type in a quotation mark in the “Find” and a quotation mark in the “Replace” and hit “Replace All”.  Voila!  You have successfully  changed all of the quotations into their smart or dumb counterpart!

Also, if you are wondering how to change only a specific instance of the quotes, say in a sentence or a single time, you can find your font’s counterpart within it’s glyph set.