Inspiring

Answered

Curly quotes

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
February 21, 2024
3 replies
2526 views

I'm using Acrobat 2024 and I can't find the preference setting for using curly quotes when editing a pdf document. Can anyone enlighten me?

Correct answer try67

There's no such setting.

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Not so long ago Adobe added a tool for editing PDFs in Adobe Express directly from Acrobat, but it seems to have disappeared.

You could, however, try editing the PDF directly with Adobe Express (or with Acrobat On Line), which might be easier (I haven't tested it).

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

M

m5heathAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks but fiddling about with different apps adds inconvenience. Acrobat is excellent except for this one omission which I have dealt with using Autohotkey.

JR Boulay

Community Expert

"I then have to use Alt+0147 etc which is ludicrously inefficient."

Can't you copy-paste the quotes?

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

M

m5heathAuthor

Inspiring

Of course I could, but if you are editing a pdf book where various pages have missing typographer's quotes, you would often be using copy paste for other text. It can be done but I am looking for convenience in an expensive and otherwise capable app.

gary_sc

Community Expert

I have a question for you, @m5heath, if curly quotes are so important, why didn't you set them in the original document? As @try67 pointed out, Acrobat is neither a word-processing application or a page layout application. Ostensibly, the application that set this book was one of those two. If you had printed out this book, would you be angered that the printer couldn't have changed the quotes to curly quotes?

Seriously, one of the big issues that Adobe has presented is to advertise the extent to which one can "edit" a PDF. I remember back in the early days of Twitter, a young lady wrote a novel on Twitter. While I admire her diligence, I do question her choice of tools.

Yes, one can change the date or fix the spelling of a name, but extensive editing is unrealistic in a PDF with Acrobat. Additionally, one of the long-standing limitations of Acrobat is to search and replace. This is shown when correcting words after OCRing a document. If you see a mistake in the OCR occurring repeatedly, there is no way to "fix all." But when doing this in either Word or InDesign, it is a few moments and done. Sadly, for this capability to exist in Acrobat, it would probably require a major rewrite of the application. With all of the other issues that Acrobat has, this is probably not on the top of their "to do" list.

try67

Correct answer

Community Expert

There's no such setting.

M

m5heathAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for your response - now I know. I do find that an extraordinary omission. I am editing a number of pdf docs and when I type a double quote of course I get the standard two vertical marks. I then have to use Alt+0147 etc which is ludicrously inefficient. Sigh.

gary_sc

Community Expert

For the record, on a Mac (on a US keyboard), a single curly quote to start is Option-] and to close is Shift-Option-]. For double curly quotes to start, it's Option-[ and for closing quotes, it's Shift-Option-[

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