Convert Straight Quotes to Smart Quotes

Manuscripts pasted from plain-text sources often arrive with straight quotes (" and ') where a typeset book should use curly smart quotes. The Edit menu has a pair of converters that fix every quotation mark in the book in one pass, in either direction.

Convert Straight Quotes to Smart Quotes

Choose Edit > Convert Straight Quotes to Smart Quotes… to fix them everywhere.

The dialog counts every straight double and single quote in your book, then lets you pick the scope under Conversion Options:

• Convert all quotes (both double and single)
• Convert only double quotes
• Convert only single quotes

Click Convert and Lacuna updates every section, then reports how many sections changed. If your book already uses smart quotes throughout, the dialog tells you there is nothing to convert.

Replace Smart Quotes with Straight Quotes

Going the other way, Edit > Replace Smart Quotes with Straight Quotes… swaps curly quotes back to straight ones, with the same all / double-only / single-only choice under Replacement Options. Handy when a publisher or tool downstream expects plain quotes.

Tip

Both conversions land in your project history, so a project-wide undo (Ctrl+Shift+Z, Cmd+Shift+Z on Mac) reverses them if the result isn’t what you wanted.

What’s Next

• Polish your line breaks next: justification and hyphenation controls how your justified text flows and where words break.
• For one-off text corrections, use find and replace.