The final beta of PageFour prior to the release of version 1.6 will be available for download shortly. One of the enhancements in this version will be the ability to handle smart quotes. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, or unaware that PageFour did not use smart quotes, they are the curly-type single and double quotes used by MS Word.
Up to now, existing PageFour users have been using old fashioned quotes identical to the ‘inch’ symbol. In terms of publishing houses and sending your work to third parties, smart quotes are pretty much expected these days, and they do look a whole lot more attractive.
One of the downsides - and it’s not much of a downside - is that smart quotes only appear correctly when using True Type fonts. Having said that, the only non-True Type font I’ve ever heard of writers using is Courier, and there is a True Type replacement for this called Dark Courier.
All of the other standard fonts - Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia, and Arial are True Type.
The addition of smart quotes should please a lot of users, as it was one of the most often requested enhancements. However, a similar ability to handle En and Em Dashes has not been possible for this release. Unfortunately, the work involved is quite considerable, but I will be looking at it for a future release.
Smart Quotes will be switched on by default, but along with a number of other cosmetic changes, can be turned on or off very simply. I’m expecting a few minor ‘glitches’ when it comes to opening and closing quotes, but hopefully these will be ironed out before the official release.
May 17th, 2007 at 2:32 am
Glad to hear we’ll be able to turn SQs off. I personally loathe the things, but then I loathe Word, so maybe that’s why *g*.
Looking forward to the next download, regardless
May 17th, 2007 at 6:18 am
I also hate the SQs, but it’s good to know the option exists.
Quite apart from the issues with the SQs, I highly recommend Dark Courier for writers anyway — it’s MUCH more readable, especially in printed form, than the Courier New fonts that ship with Windows. Apparently, Courier New is optimized for screen display, and prints much lighter than normal Courier fonts when rendered to paper.
May 17th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Now that’s interesting. Two votes against smart quotes already. Maybe they off by default…
May 18th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
I have a question though. I notice that there are alot of third party word processor components out there; how come you don’t use one of those? I imagine they have already have smart quotes and the dashes thingy.
May 18th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
There are a lot of these third party controls out there, but they’re almost ALL built on the back of the same common Windows control. This particular control does handle smart quotes, but in a non standard way, and does not easily cater to em dashes.
Without going into too much detail, it encounters problems on non-US keyboards. Because all of these controls inherit from the same Windows control, they also all inherit the same problems.
Logic would dictate that third party controls would endeavor to fix any inherited problems, but it seems that logic is not always the overriding factor in implementing such controls.
However, no problem is insurmountable.
May 20th, 2007 at 6:50 am
For the record, I love smart quotes. I don’t like documents that make it look like I still use a typewriter, and I really dislike having to manipulate all my stories in Word before printing and sending them. What about a button you could click to search and replace all the double-dashes with em dashes? I don’t mind a slightly manual approach, but it would be nice not to have to go play in Word’s sandbox.
Love Page Four, by the way!
May 20th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
That’s a possibility Meriah. I’ll see what I can do.
May 20th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
The best thing I have found out is to type in pagefour, then copy and paste into word for formatting, works great for me.