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Hi there,

I'm revising a manuscript in French which has many reference titles in English imported from an English source.
In English, apostrophe is rendered using the "apostrophe" unicode punctuation mark ('APOSTROPHE Unicode: U+0027, UTF-8: 27), like : Aristotle's Distinction
In French, in order to comply to French editing norms, Apple (or Mellel?) is rendering French apostrophe by replacing on the fly the English "apostrophe" by the "right single quotation mark" unicode punctuation mark (’RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK Unicode: U+2019, UTF-8: E2 80 99), like : l’opération.

Now I would like to perform a Find Action in Mellel so as to replace English apostrophe with French apostrophe. I thought it would be easy : put one unicode character in the "Find" text box, the other in the "Replace" text box, and then run the search.
But it doesn't work because Mellel replaces the English apostrophe with a French one preceded by a conditional blank space (like when characters are not independent but are completing the previous or the next one : tête is made typing te^te. In my example : Aristotle ’s Distinction is inserted instead of Aristotle’s Distinction.

Is there a way to neutralize this behavior?
Thanks for your help.
Manu

Hi Manu,

it doesn't work because Mellel replaces the English apostrophe with a French one preceded by a conditional blank space […] Aristotle ’s Distinction is inserted instead of Aristotle’s Distinction.

By me, Find and Replace work as expected. I therefore suggest you do the following:

Create a new, blank Mellel document. Enter "Aristotle's Distinction" and then type "Aristotle's Distinction" in the Find Box too, and see if you can change that per Find and Replace to "Aristotle’s Distinction". If that works, then the problem has something to do with your *imported* text. In that case:

Check if the imported text contains gremlins, i.e., unwanted invisible characters. For example, place the insertion point before the apostrophe and press the left arrow key. If the cursor looks as if it hasn't moved, then you have an invisible character between the apostrophe and the "e" in Aristotle. Select the invisible character, paste it into the Find and Replace box and remove all instances of it from the document.

If this doesn't help, upload a sample and I'll take a look at it.

Thanks a lot Icelander for the tip. You were right. The problem came from the fact that, preparing the find/replace Action, I pasted into the text box the invisible character associated with the apostrophe.
Problem solved. Thanks again for your help.
Hace a nice day.
Manu