Use smart quotes in dynamic text field in flash CS4

Question

I have a flash movie that has a text field where the user can enter their desired text. It has a counterpart text field that displays the user-entered text nearby. There's also a dropdown menu where the user can change the font in the display area (fonts are included in the library).

This all works fine. We noticed though that one of the fonts, English 111 Vivace BT, has smart (curly) quotes available. But as the user types, they always get straight quotes instead of curly ones. The straight quotes clearly do not match the font.

Is there a way to tell flash to use smart quotes as the default, rather than straight ones? I know users can manually force it to use curly quotes by using Alt-0146 for example, but I don't expect them to know that and even if they do it shouldn't be required.

I'm thinking I might be able to catch all quotes and encode them myself behind the scenes in AS3, so if they enter a single quote I replace it with the curly quote. But that sounds like a PITA, I'm hoping there's a setting somewhere instead. It seems like other Adobe programs do have a setting for typographic quotes, but I can't find that option in flash.

Answer 1

This sounds more like the person creating the font either made a mistake or was using some unconventional keyboard layout. Or, possibly, they were hoping for some particular text editor to replace the quotes in a special way that they were used to.

Some such editors may be MS Word (as far as I know it may "correct" quotes as you type) or Emacs (where there's plenty of input methods, possibly, there's something that automatically adjusts quotes).

In order to do something similar to MS Word or Emacs input method you'd have to do it yourself, there's no standard or conventional way on typing quotes (if I understand you correctly, those quotes have two variants, to open and close the quotation, is that correct?).

Also note that depending on the language you type in, the understanding of typographically correct quotes varies. For example Russian and German use «,», but in German the way to write it is: »quotation«, while in Russian it's «quotation». American typical way of using quotes is this: “quotation”, but sometimes, when the font has the ‚,‘ quotes they may be used, when inside another quotation, while in other languages the second pair of quotes is used for quotations inside quotations. There's also a variation of "typical American", which I think is typically British, where the opening quote is placed on the font baseline, rather than aligned with the capital letters, but I cannot find that symbol at the moment.

The whole above paragraph was written to illustrate that you don't have a set rule for placing quotes and you probably have to research what it would be most likely to be used by your audience.

(You would need to open my answer for editing to see what quote characters are used, SO replaces them with something else)