How can I replace curly quotation marks with straight ones when entering lyrics on a Mac? Straight quotation marks are usually used to indicate the octave position. I work with the Arial font and have tried everything, but I only ever get curly quotation marks. In Windows, I could use the Unicode Hex input, but is this possible on a Mac? Copying and pasting from the character palette doesn’t work either. Have any of you found a solution? Many thanks in advance.
You’re using lyrics to add something that specifies octaves?
I know that when you enter the ’ character in the lyric popover, it gets converted to curly quotes: so you could try editing it in the Edit Single Lyric window. (Right-click > Lyrics > Edit Single Lyric.)
Yes, unicode input is possible on a Mac. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find it on Apple Support, but here’s one website that covers it:
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Thank you very much, I have had actually already installed the Unicode hex input source and tried it out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work correctly with the even apostrophes. But your link leads via another link to a page where you can copy and paste the Unicode characters. Unfortunately, this only works for the one-dashed octave, for the two-dashed and more I have not found a solution … so if I now want to designate the note names according to Helmholtz (see Wikipedia) then this does not work with lyrics. But thanks anyway Ben.
I have now tried it with normal text and it works as expected. So the problem is the lyric input.
In Engraving Options / Staff Labels, there’s a checkbox next to a “smarten quotes” option. I assume that affects just staff labels, but don’t know if there’s a similar option for lyrics somewhere?
I’ve found that you can’t enter unicode into the lyrics popover. I hope someday we can. However, you can add them in the text dialog (shift-X). You could enter the straight quote in a text item or an external text editor then copy/paste into the lyrics.
There is no option at present to turn off smart quotes in lyrics.
Would it be an option to not use the ugly straight ascii quotes, but the typographically correct primes, U+2032, instead? They look like ′ (in the forum font). I haven’t tried, but I guess you can safely use them inside lyrics.
Also highly recommended for the display of feet and inches in the non-metric world, BTW.
I’ve been doing it for years. There is something else at play here.
Okay. I meant to add “using the Alt-X method when entering 4-digit unicode symbols” that is typical for windows users. For those willing to edit the windows registry, which I forgot about when posting, there is a way to hold Alt+number pad plus key then, while holding the alt key down, type in the four digit code, it works. However, I can’t figure out how to enter 5-digit unicode characters using that method. (Most music symbols are 5-digits and unlike shift-x that allows entering music symbols, that isn’t a possibility in lyrics). So, what I said is half-true about not being able to enter unicode in the lyrics popover. Why doesn’t Alt-X work?