Is there a way to keep Dorico from flipping the apostrophes in words like 'tis and ev- 'ry ?
It makes sense to me to do this with quotation marks, but it seems like this should not be the default behavior with the apostrophe.
I’m also interested in the answer to this. I have to use apostrophes in hymns all the time.
I use a keyboard layout that allows for direct input of unicode characters for apostrophes and quotation marks. Dorico doesn’t flip these.
I guess Dorico (like MS Word) turns the simple typewriter apostrophe which is accessible via most normal keyboard layouts into a typographic quotation mark, somewhat ignoring the possibility that you might want an apostrophe instead…?
Would copy and paste the glyph from another application work for you? Might be a workaround for now.
On Windows you could also insert it with Alt+0146. I hope it helps.
I just found out that you can trick Dorico into assuming that the input typewriter apostrophe is meant to be a closing quotation mark (which is identical with the apostrophe): Write any other letter before the apostrophe, close or advance the lyrics popover so Dorico does its substitution magic, then open the popover again and delete the ‘dummy letter’.
I’m looking forward to trying this. Thanks!
More on it in this thread.
I apologize for having started a duplicate thread. I do try to search first and ask questions later.
Here is another way to keep Dorico from turning a generic apostrophe into a left-facing one:
For Windows users, Alt-0146 will produce a right-facing apostrophe. Dorico will not flip this.
I don’t have a Mac but I think Option-] will produce the same result.
Even though it is conceivable that lyrics could have a quote within a quote, I think it’s far more likely that the apostrophe needs to be used when a letter at the beginning of a syllable has been omitted. I suggest that a future update restrict the auto-flipping behavior to double quotes, and that the apostrophe key be a right-facing single quote mark by default. I would guess that 99 out of 100 times this is the desired outcome. For those few times when this is not true, let the user use an alternative means to get the left-facing single quote.
I can second fkretlow and affirm that this does work like a charm if you can’t remember the key stroke for the special forced apostrophe.
Thanks, David, for digging out the old thread. I wasn’t aware of it either.
Just curious, as I’m not a native speaker: aren’t single quotation marks standard in English texts, with double quotation marks appearing only in nested quotations?
Perhaps one day Dorico can become aware of the language of the OS it’s installed on and modify its substitution rules accordingly. (For German texts we would need opening quotation marks on the baseline.) Or, more flexible, an option for specifying the language of different bits of text like in common word processors. But that’s of course pretty far away from the core necessities of notation software. Just an idea.
I think that certainly used to be the case and the precise opposite was true for American quotations. That said, these things are evolving all the time - arguably faster than ever with the Internet now in play - and I’m not certain there is a standard approach any more.
British English and American English have different conventions for quotes. British English uses single quote marks, with double quotes for the second level, e.g. ‘I shouted “go away” but he ignored me’. American English uses the reverse, e.g. “I shouted ‘go away’ but he ignored me”.
FWIW modern programming languages have the concept of a “locale” (or something equivalent) which changes the default settings for country-dependent features like the formatting numbers and money (e.g. is the decimal point marked by “,” or “.”), times and dates, the alphabetic collating sequence (in some languages that use the Western alphabet, the order is more complicated than just A-Z - for example in Dutch “IJ” represents a single letter, so in some sense “IJ” is between “IZ” and “JA”, not between “II” and “IK”), etc. But that still leaves the issue of using the locale information when writing software, which isn’t always easy - especially if you need to extend the default contents of the “locale database” to store application-specific information.
This is very informative. I didn’t realize that the British convention was the opposite of what we use in the States. Perhaps a simpler solution than being aware of the user’s locale would be to provide an option for how single quotes are treated by default.
Well, if you want to support languages other than American and British English, this isn’t “simple” at all. See
I love some of the names in other languages - goose eyes, goose feet, cat paws, little fir trees, fingernail marks, etc. And Hungarian uses three levels of nested quotes, not just two!
That could get complicated quickly. I’m just asking for better handling of the apostrophe for American English.
Yeah, it’s tough sometimes when you get outvoted by the 95% of the world population who aren’t American! 