The Mac has long used the straight quote style for double and single quotes, looking like ” and ‘ respectively. It’s been that way for as long as I remember, but if you’d like to change the quote style to something else, perhaps a bit more fanciful, you can do so through a settings adjustment.
Swapping out the quote style offers a a total of eight different varieties for each single quotes and double quotes, and you don’t need to have them match though it’s probably recommended to do so. Whether you like curlies, fancies, or straights you should be a happy camper with the choices available.
How to Disable Smart Quotes & Curly Quotes on a Mac
Here’s what you’ll want to do to adjust the style of quotes in OS X:
- Go to Apple menu and open System Preferences
- Choose “Keyboard” and select the “Text” tab
- Pull down the submenus alongside “Double Quotes” and “Single Quotes” and select your preferred quote style for each
- Exit System Preferences when finished
The change is immediate and you don’t need to close System Preferences for the adjustment to take effect, so if you want to test this out it’s a good idea to have TextEdit open. It won’t automatically replace previously entered quotes of any style, so just go ahead and type the double and single quote again to see the difference.
Some OS X Mavericks users should find this tip particularly worthwhile, since a fair amount of upgrade users have discovered that regular quotes and curly quotes were mysteriously and randomly replaced by an odd bracket variety »»»» and «««« (I’m not sure of the technical name for that quote style, feel free to chime in the comments if you happen to know what these are called).
If you ran into the quote replacement issue yourself and thought it was text substitution or something else, it’s not, it’s just the seemingly random quote style assigned to some Macs during the upgrade process. There have been some claims that this only occurred on Macs that were upgraded after Emoji characters had been used in OS X, but that hasn’t been confirmed and seems fairly unlikely.
Anyway, enjoy your new quote style, whether you prefer curly or straight quotes or any of the other styles.
Follow Me:
Top Best Sellers!!
