This image shows a piece of text in MS Word:
Now let's save this text in .TXT format:
As you see, the image with a red arrow in the original Word .doc has got lost but the quote marks all curl to the left or right.
We now want to ensure the curly left and right quotes get handled in the simplest way in WordSmith. It'll be easier to get your settings right in WordSmith if you use one character for both left-curling and right-curling apostrophes and quotes.
To understand the problem, let's first take a detailed look at the text file. Using File Viewer, we can see exactly which characters these quote marks are.
Start File Viewer and select the text. You may see something like this:
These strange numbers are meaningful: look at the line starting 00000110 above and then examine the eight numbers. 0D and 0A mean <Enter> was pressed for a new paragraph, then we get 93 43 75 etc. 43 is the C of Curly and 75 is the u. The 93 is the computer code meaning double-left-curly-quotes. On the line below you'll see a 94, which is the code for double-right-curly-quotes. Elsewhere in the screenshot you'll find 91 is a single-left-crly-quote and 92 a single-right-curly-quote mark. In other words, each of these marks is represented by a different code.
It will make things simpler in WordSmith if we can simply change all these slightly different shapes for something standardised.
Accordingly, let's start Text Converter, and make the changes. I'm showing you here with one tiny file, but Text Converter can do this for a whole lot of text files one after the other. Choose our text
and in Conversion choose Whole Files:
and if all goes well
Right-click to look at the result.
All the single quotes are the same (code 27), all double quotes are (22) as you can confirm using File Viewer:
