Inverted inverted commas (inverted "speech marks")

[JohnWasilewski]

In my writing, I often need to quote part of something another person has written or said. This can very often be just a short phrase of part of a sentence, which I indicate by means of an ellipsis to signify preceding and/or following words that are omitted.

I confess that I have struggled with this both needlessly and idiotically for years. I have been entering a string of three dots for a preceding ellipsis. TextMaker appears, not unreasonably, to treat these as a (somewhat illogical) string of three full stops. Then, on encountering my opening inverted commas, TexMaker treats these as following a full stop and inverts them, as if they were to signify the end of my quoted passage, npt the start. I then get, for example, this:

Code: Select all

He considers the ground pressures (which he calls ”...the vertical soil stresses...”) are minimal.

Notice how the opening inverted commas are the wrong way round.
I have fought with TextMaker many times, eventually managing to defeat the auto-correct feature, in order to force it to accept instead,

Code: Select all

He considers the ground pressures (which he calls “...the vertical soil stresses...”) are minimal.

And finally, guess what, I have at last taken the tiny amount of trouble to find out how, with MacOS at least, one can enter an ellipsis, not with a string of three dots, but by typing [option-semicolon]. The ellipsis is then entered as a single character, and, oh bliss, it comes out the way I ant at the first attempt:

Code: Select all

He considers the ground pressures (which he calls  “…the vertical soil stresses…”) are minimal.

It even looks better, as well!

My reason for writing this sad story is because I'd like to suggest that it would help make TextMaker as user-friendly as it could be if, by default, it were to recognise a string of three dots (when it is ONLY three) as a ham-fisted user's way of typing what is supposed to be an ellipsis.
----
John

[Jossi]

Well, users who care for such typographic niceties as correct quotation marks or the difference between three dots and an ellipsis can surely be moved to define a keyboard shortcut for an ellipsis.