Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Stop

Anyone who has ever written pseudo code using Microsoft Word and pasted it somewhere else knows the pain of the “smart quote,” those curly quotation marks that authors love and programmers hate. From experience I can tell you that WordPress hates them, or at least is inconsistent in the way it handles them. Even when they appear correctly within my blog, WordPress mucks them up when passing headlines off to Facebook and Twitter.

So far, the easiest way I’ve found to deal with smart quotes is to turn them off. I disabled them in the WordPress editor, and because I write so many blog drafts in Google Docs, I turned them off there too. For a long time, this has worked.

But now I’m back in school, writing short stories that require very a specific format. That includes paragraph tabs, spacing issues, and yes — smart quotes. After spending the past couple of weeks working on a short story, I cut the text from Google Docs and pasted it into Microsoft Word only to find a complete mess. I searched Google and found a few tricks to help me convert all the quotation marks, apostrophes, and dashes back into their “smart” counterparts, but it was still more work than I want to do every time I write a story. I love the portability that Google Docs affords me and hate the idea of writing things in a single Word file (I worked on my last short story via three different computers), but I hate having to reformat all my work even more.

What I wish is that Google Docs had a button that would allow you to “swap” between two different sets of settings. I don’t know if that’s possible or not. If that’s not possible, the next best thing would be some way to load and save settings — things like spacing and, yes, turning on and off smart quotes. The best solution I’ve found so far is creating two different documents, changing the settings to the way I want them, and then making a copy of that empty document and writing in that copy. Surely that’s not the best solution, is it?