Turning off Zotero6 Notes smart quotes

RonBurk

Thanks for all the cool new features in 6!

I write in ASCII and prefer the ability to write my Zotero notes in ASCII (normally available virtually everywhere in the known universe) so I can cut and paste from Zotero into a manuscript. The new editor seems to insist on translating an ASCII double quote into a non-ASCII left or right double-quote according to some undocumented algorithm.

Any way to turn off the smart quoting in the new Notes editor so that pressing the " key stores an ASCII quote (hex 22)? Barring that, is there any escape mechanism for entering characters that one doesn't want the editor to mess with?

Also, is there any documentation for the new Notes editor? I keep finding features by stumbling over them in the forums via folklore rather than documentation. This link seems to not be... helpful: https://www.zotero.org/support/notes

Unable to find any current documentation, I saw a forum message reference this page on (sigh) markdown, but the escape mechanism there doesn't seem to work in the 6 Notes editor, so I guess Zotero has moved to some kind of undocumented homegrown markdown? https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/

dstillman

Yes, we'll be adding an option to disable smart quotes in the note editor.

the escape mechanism there doesn't seem to work in the 6 Notes editor, so I guess Zotero has moved to some kind of undocumented homegrown markdown?

It's not a Markdown editor, so escaping wouldn't make sense. It just supports Markdown syntax that people are used to to trigger common formatting (e.g., **bold**), alongside other standard keyboard shortcuts (e.g., Cmd/Ctrl-B). You can press Cmd/Ctrl-Z to undo automatic conversions, including for smart quotes until there's a setting to disable them.

dstillman

@RonBurk: In Zotero 6.0.6, available now, we've added a hidden pref, note.smartQuotes, to disable smart quotes. You'll need to reload the note editor after changing the pref for it to take effect. We'll make this a visible pref in a future version.

RonBurk

Awesome! Thank you!