Firefox is turning straight quotes into curly quotes on the Mac, and doing it incorrectly.
I have a site with html rendered books. The rendering of apostrophes and quotes is important to the meaning of the text. In most instances we are using straight quotes and apostrophes because the books are transformed into formats other than html that may not support open and closed quotes. Firefox on Linux and Windows renders these documents fine, but on osX, the Mac, it seems to be auto-interpreting the quotes and rendering them as open or closed curly quotes? This would be fine except that it doesn't do it correctly all the time. It always miss-interprets a leading single quote as a open or left facing quote when it should be a closed or right facing quote when used to signify a contracted word.
Can I turn this feature off some how?
Ideally in the html, though a setting in the browser would at least allow us to advise the readers of the problem and how to correct it.
As I said this only happens on the Mac. We are not seeing this problem in Safari on the Mac so I don't think it can be blamed wholy on the OS.
Modified by scott@tnstaafl.net
All Replies (5)
I just figured out another situation where single quotes, ort apostrophes are backwards. If the text is styled with "small-caps" like the word Mother's, the single quote is a curly quote and turned backwards .
an example of html
Mother's Evening Prayer
I'm actually using external css in the real html
span.hi.small-caps {
font-variant: small-caps;
}
Modified by scott@tnstaafl.net
If you provide a link to your website then someone with a Mac can test it.
I'm on Linux,so can't do that.
Are you using HTML entities or Unicode for the quotes?
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OK I cross posted this question at
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=2006045
I have uploaded a test file
http://tnstaafl.net/test/test.html
If you are on a MAC and using Firefox 3.6 can you load the test.html and tell me what kind of apostrophe's you see and if they are curly which way are they pointing?
thanks,
Scott
This problem has taken an odd twist. First , I am the developer and only have access to Linux and Windoze systems, which do not exhibit the problem. I requested the people who are experiencing it to verify they see the problem on the test page I mentioned above. They do not. But if they copy the test page to their local machine it appears! Weird huh?
Why would Firefox on the MAC render a page differently loaded locally then from a remote web server. On the same program on two different tabs they are rendered with different apostrophe's?
If you view the source of the html document test.html you can see I am using the keyboard supplied ascii ' A straight apostrophe, not a Unicode apostrophe ' nor a Unicode quote either ‘ or ’
I'm still greatly mystified why this character would be displayed differently depending on the location of the document?