Quotation Marks

Besides tripping over ill-copied indentation when moving MS Word documents over to Google Docs or to a able wiki, my biggest pain is the complete inability to use smart quotation marks. You can only use dumb quotation marks.

No, I'm not being opinionated. Those are actual terms. See below:

Smart Quotes

by Ilene Strizver

One of the most irritating typographic faux pas is the use of straight quotation marks (also called “dumb” quotes) instead of true typographic quotation marks (“smart” or “curly” quotes). How did this dumb-versus-smart muddle begin? Blame the engineers: the standard keyboard layout (which was not created by typographers!) has straight quotes in place of real quotes. As designers, it’s our job to use our “smarts” to work around this all-too-common problem.

Get smart!
What’s the difference between smart and dumb? Smart quotes are usually curved in shape and have different opening and closing versions for use at the beginning and end of quoted material, respectively.Dumb (or straight) quotes are usually simple tapered vertical or angled marks . These are also referred to as “primes,” and should be used in numerical measurements to indicate inches (a double prime) and feet (a single prime).

Source: http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Articles/fyti/Smartquotes.htm

By default, MS Word uses smart quotation marks automatically. Meaning that the quotation marks change when they detect the usage. So any fictional work of mine that contains dialog has those smart quotation marks.

Copy and pasting brings them all over to the google doc page or the wiki, but when it comes to editing that page any new quotation mark will be dumb. It's just dumb!

But as I have been reading up on a way to solve this problem, I noticed gossip whispering about how smart quotation marks might disappear all together since dumb quotations are standard on keyboards and in website language.

I think that's a little scary. I think we need smart quotes. What do you think?