As I’ve mentioned previously, Apple does at least one thing with each new OS release that a) annoys me and b) makes me wonder about the thought process that went behind it.
In Mavericks, it’s smart quotes. These are quotes that are curved in shape and face in different directions, depending on if they’re opening quotes or closing quotes.
Having smart quotes is inconvenient for me because I can’t always tell when they’re in use until I copy and paste. If I’m copying and pasting content into a script, smart quotation marks aren’t recognized as legal quote marks, which means I have to find and replace them.
Fortunately, it’s possible to turn smart quotes off. See below the jump for details.
There’s two places I know of where you may need to turn off smart quotes:
B. TextEdit
To disable smart quotes via System Preferences:
1. Open System Preferences
2. Select the Keyboard preference pane
3. Select the Text tab in the Keyboard preferences
4. Uncheck Use smart quotes and dashes
To disable smart quotes in TextEdit
1. Launch TextEdit
2. In the TextEdit menu, select Preferences…
3. Uncheck Smart quotes and Smart dashes
4. Close the the Preferences window
5. In TextEdit’s Edit menu, select Substitutions
6. Under Substitutions, uncheck Smart Quotes and Smart Dashes
Once smart quotes have been disabled, quotes should return to being non-curly quotes marks.
Other applications may have smart quote settings, so you may need to check in the application settings.
