Why does Paratext when drafting generate a wrong quotation mark instead of the one I enter?

Question

Hi,

I’ve a problem with quotation marks in my Paratext project. Whenever I want to type standard quotation marks (“ and ”, Unicode value 201C and 201D), it generates " (Unicode value 022).

My co-workers who have worked on this same project for several years had this problem from the beginning and have never been able to fix it.

Any ideas why this is happening and how to fix it?

Thanks,
Christopher

Answer 1

Hello Christopher.

The autocorrect.txt option will solve your need. You can see a full explanation of how to create and configure it in the following link: https://paratext.org/2018/10/03/using-autocorrect/

What happens is that if you use a default Windows keyboard, it is not possible to get certain characters when typing, like the tilted quotation marks“ ” or the m-dash (u2014). Therefore, if in Paratext you press Shift+2 you will get u0022.

Some programs like Word make changes automatically (an example in this link), because they assume what should be "autocorrected" due to the fact that it works with languages of millions of speakers. For our projects, Paratext will not assume any automatic changes unless they have been specifically configured by an administrator, which is very good because it protects the consistency of language decisions.

Saludos,
Pepe.