German Quotation Marks in the Comments' Text Editor

schaeferb01

Hi there,

I'm using Zotero's comments function to summarize the books i'm reading.
"Unfortunately" in German there are 2 different kinds of citation/quotation marks used as in example 1.

1) „Wer sich nicht mehr wundern kann, der ist seelisch bereits tot.“ Albert Einstein (in MS Word)

2) "Who can no longer pause to wonder is as good as dead" Albert Einstein (in Zotero)

Is there a chance to change these citation/quotation marks in the texteditor of the standalone application (for mac)? Or am I just doing something wrong?

This "issue" or as Germans would say „Schwierigkeit" ;) makes it very difficult to use zotero in the field of science, as every citation has to be edited in the final text document afterwards.

Thanks in advance, Ben

adamsmith

like most text editors (as opposed to word processors), Zotero's note editor doesn't auto-convert smart quotes. That's not specific to German. The English quote you have is also typographically incorrect and should properly be:
“Who can no longer pause to wonder is as good as dead”

A simple search and replace in Word for " --> " will automatically convert straight quotes to the language-appropriate smart quotes.
The other option is to type the smart quotes directly into the note editor with your keyboard. How hard/easy that is depends on your operating system:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anf%C3%BChrungszeichen#Direkte_Eingabe_per_Tastatur

schaeferb01

Thanks to your quick response, I found out that MS Word has an auto function for changing the to the language-appropriate smart quotes. So changing them afterwards is no problem anymore:

> Format > AutoFormat > OK

the following option must be checked:
"Gerade Anführungszeichen" durch „typographische ersetzen"

THANKS A LOT!