Quotes not matching Dictionary settings for specific languages

Question

I have a document (well, a set of documents) where I simply cannot get InDesign to use the correct quotes defined for certain text languages.

The documents are bilingual, in Danish and English. The Danish text should use »inwards guillemets« for double quotes and ‘regular 69s’ for single quotes. The English text should use “regular 6699s” for double quotes and ‘regular 69s’ for single quotes.

In Preferences → Dictionary, I have set quotes accordingly (for Danish here):

It works as expected for paragraphs whose language is set to English: “double quotes” and ‘single quotes’.

But regardless of what values I select in the Dictionary settings, in paragraph styles whose language is set to Danish, the automatic quote substitution consistently changes all quotation marks to German-style quotes: „double quotes“ and ,single quotes‘. In some, seemingly completely random, cases it even changes them to „lower lower„ – which is most definitely incorrect in every language on earth.

This isn’t an issue I’ve ever seen before; it’s only in these files. The files originate with another designer, but they display the same weirdness on his machine. It makes no difference if the language is set in a paragraph style or as a manual override.

Inspecting the applied language of an insertion point through ExtendScript gives me the following, which looks completely as it should (note the ‘doubleQuotes’ and ‘singleQuotes’ properties are correctly listed as »« and ‘’), so it’s not just the UI in the preferences dialogue that’s somehow ‘stuck’ and out of sync with the actual content in the document:

What can possibly be causing this? What other settings/things can affect InDesign’s usually very intelligent quote substitution?

(Tested on my M1 Max Mac Studio running InDesign 2025 (20.5) on macOS Sequoia 15.6, and on the other designer’s iMac, whose specs, app version and OS I don’t have.)

Janus Bahs Jacquet · Accepted Answer

Well, I have to report first that I'm experiencing much different behavior now that I've restarted InDesign. I can't recreate any of the wierdness in quote behavior that I saw earlier today. Everything seems to behave as expected (no inexplicable stray single quotes!), and if I change the default quotes for Danish to reversed guillemets, that's what gets keyed in when I whack the appropriate key.

Right now, when I look at your "test file.indd" it looks like Edit -> Preferences -> Type -> Use Typographer's Quotes is actually turned off. If this isn't what happens when you go to your Preferences and click this box yourself:

then maybe something is damaged about your installation of InDesign, and you should consider resetting your preferences.

(If you don't mind a digression: isn't »this« how to handle quotes when setting type in Danish, though? That's what I'd think ought to happen, if you asked me "what should happen when you whack the double-quote key if Danish language is selected Use Typographer's Quotes is turned on?" The "regular-9999s" you mention in reference to Danish in my mind would be equivalent, localization-wise, to straight quotes in English: adequately correct, and likely what you ought to get by whacking the double quote key if Use Typographer's Quotes was turned off. )

Oh, you’re right – typographer’s quotes were turned off in the document. I’d turned that setting on and off several times for testing, and I must have accidentally forgotten to turn it back on before uploading.

I just restarted InDesign as well, with typographer’s quotes turned on, and while changing the language in the paragraph style (with Preview enabled) still just switches between proper “”/‘’ for English and „“/,‘ for Danish, typing new quotes or using Find/Replace (with GREP) to change [“"”] and [‘'’] to just " and ' respectively does give me the correct quotes now.

So I guess a restart plus a toggle of the typographer’s quotes setting was what was required.

Joel Cherney · Answer

I am finding similar quote-related issues, but I'm not 100% certain how much of what I'm finding is InDesign functioning as intended.

Is the designer that assembled this document aquiring Danish text from some other source (e.g. placing MS Word files, getting bilingual English/Danish IDML back from a translation firm, etc.), or did they key it in themselves, or paste it in? And if it was keyed in, was it done with Danish input settings, or was the keyboard set to English? What's the state of the "Use typographer's quotes" setting in the document at hand? I'm guessing that, since you mention "other settings/things can affect InDesign’s usually very intelligent quote substitution" you probably have "Use typographer's quotes" turned on in your default settings in your preferences. However, you are getting files from this other designer, and that setting is document-specific, so it might be turned off in this document?

What I'm gettting instead of Quotes That Make Sense For Danish is a backwards close quote.

That's the way that it'd work in Finnish, or Swedish, right? But that's when I am keying in quotes from a us_EN keyboard with the standard Windows English language keyboard active. If I switch to a Danish keyboard, I'd expect shift-2 to key in a quote mark, and it does. But if I had Danish language selected in InDesign and Typographer's Quotes turned on, I'd expect guillemets, not... open quotes as if I were working in Finnish, which is what I posted above.

If I turn on French language in InDesign, and whack the quote key with the English keyboard turned on, I get guillemets, which is correct for French. If I turn on German language in InDesign, and whack the quote key with the English keyboard turned on, I get a low-9 open quote and a high-6 close quote, which is correct for German. Turn the language setting back to Danish, and I get... Finnish.

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