This site uses "curly" Quotes

Gina - I just noticed that quotation marks used in the text of any posts end up showing up as the dreaded "curly" quotes (as Apple's TextEdit uses by default). As you type, they display as the desired straight quotes, but once the post is saved, it shows up as the curly style.

I checked, and cutting and pasting them into a file I'm editing via nano on the Pi shows them as the curly quotes.

Using "preformatted text" in a post appears to dodge the problem, but I'm guessing no matter how much we mention that, some people will miss it and cut and post without choosing preformat, causing users problems with cut and pasted text.

Is there any way to change the default behavior of the quotes used to avoid causing issues?

I fear not. But this is exactly why anything like logs, commands and such should always be pasted as preformatted text using single backticks (`) or

code fences

using triple backticks (```) around them. I saw that the guys over at the Home Assistance board have a banner pinned to the top of the board to remind people of that. I'll see if I can get something like that to work here as well.

I didn't see a code fence option in the little menu of icons at the top of a post. How did you do that, and can we make it more obvious for users (i.e. include a code fence icon in the menu bar)?

If you have an easy way to add a code block, I'll edit to include that in my WiFi Connection issues post in the help section.

It's a typical Markdown feature.

I just found an option to disable fancy ASCII conversions, but it only seems to apply to titles. I'm still looking for an equivalent for posts.

I also found an option to change the "preformatted text" button to insert a code block instead of inline code, but so far no way to have both. I'm unsure which would be more important to have there. Personally I have to admit that I so far haven't even used those buttons.

Update I might just have found something:

Not sure though what we lose by disabling that, "improve text readability" and "reduces number of question marks" certainly sounds good. I've nevertheless disabled it for now and we'll just see what happens I guess.

@foosel while attempting to edit my post in the help section about WiFi connections and using the appropriate text editor, I accidentally deleted it. Is there a way to recover that, or do I need to recreate it? (I'm hoping it can be recovered to the same position - the first reply to the intro post in the thread - since it seems to be such a common issue.)

Just recovered it :slight_smile: All posts have their own revision history, so that makes things fairly easy :smiley:

thanks. I couldn't figure out how to get to a reversion history. I'm guessing that's Admin only?

The history is behind the little orange edit pencil in the upper right corner of each post that was edited at least once:

But as far as I can see users can only see the changes, not revert them. Might also be related to trust levels, not sure yet, have to reread that topic.

It looks as though that changed the "curly" quotes in my example to the straight ones. That should help avoid errors if people cut and paste from something that did not use a code block. (I'll go back and edit my example, since it no longer shows the curly quotes.)