This is the first of a new series of posts here on InDesigning.net giving you handy tools to achieve better typography in InDesign. The posts will be small guides ranging from beginner to intermediate level, teaching how to achieve specific things.
This first post is about getting your quotation marks right.
Typographer's quotes
Per default, typographer's quotes will be turned on for new documents in InDesign. As with all the settings in InDesign you can set your default preferences by launching the Preferences when all documents are closed.
When typographer's quotes are turned on, InDesign will use real quotation marks instead of primes. Luckily for english speaking people the default setting for quotes are “like this”. Bad luck for the rest of us, because that is wrong in most other languages, and it is really rare that people get it right.
Besides defining whether to use typographer's quotes in Preferences » Type, you can change which kind of quotes you wish to use in Preferences » Dictionary. When you change the quotes, remember to have the right language selected, because which quotes are typed depends on the language specified for the text you are writing. In Danish the correct quotation marks are „like this“ - for a nice list of usages in different languages, look at Wikipedia.
Danish quotation mark settings.
Writing the quotes
When the typographer's quotes feature is turned on, InDesign will automatically write the right quotation mark when you type the character as you are used to. Remember that what marks are used depends on the language the text is set to.
An example of the real quotation marks in use.
If you realize to late, that you were writing with the wrong quotes or language settings, it is never to late to change it. Select the right language and find/change is your solution: search for a primer ("), and change them to a primer ("). InDesign will find all quotation marks and change them to the right typographer's quotes, again depending on the language of text it is a part of and the Dictionary settings.
Find/change quotation marks.
Comments
Laith Ibrahim wrote:
This article is very interesting. I usually have a problem with quotation marks when dealing with Arabic text in Indesign. There are very few good Arabic fonts and most of their glyph sets are not complete. Instead of quotation marks I sometimes get both inch marks and another that looks like two very small parenthesis. I have to do "search and find" to change them and sometimes have to susitute them with Latin ones because they are not available. Because inch marks look the same on both sides (beginning and end), I have to change all instances of one side first then change the 2nd side. Is there a way to change all these inch marks with just one command. Any script that will put the correct quotation mark depending on where the inch mark is?
Thanks for any help.
Laith
Silkjaer wrote:
If using typographer's quotes, searching for inch marks and replacing with inch/primers (") will automatically place the right quotation mark depending on the location of the mark in the sentence.
I am not sure on how many factors InDesign use to determine what quotation mark is the right in the given context, but at least it checks for whitespace before and after (spaces etc.). If there is a space before its a beginning quote, if there is a space after, its an ending quote ...
If you for some reason can't or won't use typographer's quotes, I think the only way is how you do it now, searching for them seperately.
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