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[MacDibble]

In these days of computers and international submissions, it is helpful to use an initial punctuation style that is going to translate easily from text style to text style and to US punctuation.

So many times I've had to swap the double quote marks for singles to be compatible with a US magazine or to swap slanty quote marks for straight up and down quote marks to be compatible with a text only submission.

Of course the wonderful "find" and "replace" tool is fantastic for being able to write in Australian and then replace all the double quotes for singles but I wish basic fonts like Courier would use straight quotes instead of slanty, and basic dashes, etc. And is there anyway to "find" and "replace" the single quotes within doubles once you've singled the doubles with the previous "find" and "replace"? (Did that make sense?)

Sometimes I feel life would be easier if I just wrote everything in Notepad!

Does anyone have any tips for being punctuationally compatible?

[TheBoss]

In MS Word there is something you can do to minimise the pain when converting quotes.

Make a backup. Or two, just to be sure.

Turn off one of the Replace As You Type features. Under Tools, Auto Correct Options on the AutoFormat As You Type tab, UNcheck the Replace as you Type option for "Straight quotes" with "Smart quotes".

Click on Edit, Replace, and in both the Find and Replace fields, put a " (or ' depending on what you want to convert), then click Find Next or Replace All. Any "smart" quotes will now be converted to straight quotes.

To convert double quotes to singles and vice versa (swap), first use Replace to convert ' to # (or any symbol you know isn't used in your text), then Replace " with ', then replace # with ". Done. Almost. You didn"t think it would be that easy did you? All your single apostrophes in contractions and possessives are now double quotes. Use Replace again to change "t to 't, "s to 's, and any other combinations you have used.

If you are doing your own copy editing, read your entire text backwards to pick up any misses.

There are a few style-checkers available (google for 'style checker') that might help with quotes within quotes, but I've never used one so I'm not sure of their capabilities

[MacDibble]

Ooooh, good idea re the #. And you can even do that if you don't own the evil MS Word.

Reading backwards might get boring by the 180,000th word tho...