Quote Unquote
Monday, July 26, 2004I was just typing some text in Illustrator CS and I never noticed it before, but the program automatically uses proper typographer’s quotes (or smart quotes, or curly-cue quotes, or whatever your label of choice may be) when typing instead of the straight up-n-down inch marks.
It’s about time Adobe implemented this feature (I checked; it’s in the CS version of Photoshop as well). Hopefully this will reduce the scads of ignorant apostrophe catastrophes in the design world that get me so riled up.
Yay for proper typography!
josie says:
Just had to let you know that I love the new header image.
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josie says:
...more specifically, the one with the old typeset letters. I’d never seen that one before.
Dustin Perkins says:
As you probably know, there was always a way to use proper printer’s quotes in any Mac program:
(shift)-option-] for single quotes and apostrophes and (shift)-option-[ for double quotes.
Most of the text I work with in Illustrator is pasted in from other sources so it still requires a search and replace to get the proper characters, but now with Illustrator CS I’m at a loss as to how to type a proper inch or foot mark.
Yay, supposedly helpful, non-standard behavior.
Ben Hillman says:
But what if you DO want straight quotes for inches and feet? There doesn’t seem to be a way to get that directly in Illustrator CS. Is there?
GN says:
Greetings:
I actually arrived here doing a Google on “Inch and foot marks Illustrator CS.” I’m right in the middle of a project on Illustrator CS (Mac OSX Panther) and was getting frustrated on the same thing, since CS automatically puts in “smart” quotes. I’ve found a solution, though (keep in mind I’m using Panther on Mac):
First of all, make sure you go to System Prefs. Click on “International.”
Click on “Input Menu.”
Click “On” check boxes next to “Character Palette” and “Keyboard Viewer” in the list.*
*Note: I use U.S. Roman for my language, so if you also use this, make sure U.S. is clicked as well.
Now, when you need to insert a “foot” or “inch” mark in Illustrator CS, just look at the upper right hand corner of your screen (where the time/date stamp is)...click on the flag (the U.S. flag, in my case) - a dropdown menu will appear. Choose “Show Character Palette” and you’ll find a whole character map including all the special symbols you have at your disposal.
Choose the inch or foot mark and you can literally drag it from the box to your Illustrator document. Adjust as needed.
That seems to be the only way that I’ve found...trust me, I’ve done OPT-, CMD- and SHIFT- combos on every single letter on the keyboard and came up with zilch. If anyone knows the magic combo, drop me a line!
Hope this helped,
GN
Senioré Soosy says:
I also got here via a google search. I finally figured out that you can turn off Smart Quotes in Photoshop under General Preferences and in Illustrator with the Type Menu -> Smart Punctuation. You have to re-enable the same way though, so not very elegant.
Hoarsevomit says:
Thanks Senioré Soosy, turning off Smart Quotes did the trick! You can also leave this preference off and use the old Option-Shift- [,],{ or } trick.
chris says:
Glyphs work for inch foot marks. Even turning off smart quotes won’t help! Sucks when you need them in all documents.
chris says:
GOT IT!
Under document set up. “type” will give you a choice of the old or new keyboard setup.
chris says:
GOT IT!
Under document set up. “type” will give you a choice of the old or new keyboard setup.